Case Study

Celonis: The process mining unicorn

13 pages
December 2021
Reference: IMD-7-2161

MUNICH, GERMANY, JANUARY 2019. Bastian Nominacher pondered how much Celonis had changed from its start in 2011, when he and his two co-founders were coding in a crammed 15-square-meter room in his flat. Reaching unicorn valuation felt “like driving a car at 250 kilometers per hour while changing the wheels,” he liked to say. It had been quite a ride. The journey had entailed sending a thousand hand-written letters to leads, dropping in (uninvited) to a fancy golf club to pitch Celonis to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tycoon, bootstrapping without external funding for seven years, despite the prevailing view that technology startups should aim to scale as fast as possible … and a few even less glamorous activities that sounded quite surreal today. Graduating into the unicorn club had attracted the attention of prospects, current clients and competitors alike. The surge in leads required not only growing the sales team but also tightening the ties with SAP’s sales team. Current clients were asking for increasingly complex projects requiring tighter integration with their information systems; hence, Celonis’ younger management team had to pitch to more senior executives. Finally, the focus on scaling prompted Celonis to undergo a technological shift towards a cloud-based platform model and Celonis launched the Intelligent Business Cloud in October 2018. Was that not too much for the client base? Would the company culture survive the fast growth? And would the founders’ leadership team survive the transformation?

Learning Objective
  • Examine the managerial issues in a fast-growing technology company at the leading edge of digital transformation and big data analytics
  • Explore the pros and cons of various business models available to a software company, in particular the value of building an ecosystem
  • Analyze Celonis’s contribution to the broader adoption of Lean and Six Sigma by enabling the real-time analysis of digital process data
  • Discuss the challenges of fundraising for fast-growing technology companies in Europe
Keywords
Big Data, Process Management, Data Mining, Consultancy, Growth Management, Start-up, Technology Management, Scale-up, Growth
Settings
Europe, Germany
Celonis, Business Management Services, Consultancy
2015-2020
Type
Field Research
Copyright
© 2021
Available Languages
English
Related material
Teaching note, Video
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This case study is part of a series
  • Celonis: Building a lean digital ecosystem
  • Celonis: The process mining unicorn
This case study is part of a series
  • Celonis: Building a lean digital ecosystem
  • Celonis: The process mining unicorn
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Celonis: Building a lean digital ecosystem
By Carlos Cordon Benoit F. Leleux and Marc Chauvet
Case reference: IMD-7-2286 ©2022
Summary
To maintain its position as the category leader in process mining and execution management, Celonis needed to be able to facilitate – or even autom...
2023 John Molson MBA International Case Writing Competition - 3rd Prize
Reference IMD-7-2286
Copyright ©2022
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Celonis
Industry Business Management Services, Consultancy
Available Languages English
Contact

Research Information & Knowledge Hub for additional information on IMD publications

Celonis: The process mining unicorn
By Benoit F. Leleux and Marc Chauvet
Case reference: IMD-7-2161 ©2021
Summary
MUNICH, GERMANY, JANUARY 2019. Bastian Nominacher pondered how much Celonis had changed from its start in 2011, when he and his two co-founders wer...
Reference IMD-7-2161
Copyright ©2021
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Celonis
Industry Business Management Services, Consultancy
Available Languages English
Contact

Research Information & Knowledge Hub for additional information on IMD publications