The Rise of The Execution Management System

What separates AltaVista and Google? Faraday Future and Tesla? Blockbuster and Netflix? Some of those companies beat their illustrious competitors to market, some had more money and experience, but the story of business winners and losers often boils down to one thing: execution.

“In 2016, it was estimated that 67% of well-formulated strategies failed due to poor execution,” according to Harvard Business Review.

No matter how good your ideas are, if you cannot out-execute your competition, you are destined to be overtaken and eventually crushed. But what is execution in a business context? It comes down to process.

A post-millennial epiphany

After the dot com boom and the advent of cloud computing, new tools emerged to allow organizations to ‘mine’ their business processes and uncover hidden gains.

For years, Celonis has pioneered the space of process mining, helping organizations like Lufthansa and Uber to squeeze the most value possible from their existing business processes, without having to bring in an army of external consultants for a costly and time-consuming process discovery exercise.

Process mining examines enterprise application log files, data flows and system workload demands to get a fuller picture of how your organization is running. This intelligence allows the business to keep operational throughput efficiently-costed and smoothly executed.

Once an organization gets to grips with its business processes and creates effective feedback loops, the results often speak for themselves. “In successfully executing companies, 77% effectively translate their strategy into operational mechanisms and monitor day-to-day progress,” according to Harvard Business Review.

From process to platform to execution

Despite the breadth of many of these platforms, this is not a one-click solution. A further layer of information intelligence and control is required if enterprises are to move beyond small efficiency gains and truly unlock their delivery potential.

Today, an Execution Management System (EMS) from Celonis can be called upon to quickly identify execution gaps in an enterprise’s transactional systems of record, systems of action and systems of insight. Only by implementing an EMS can a business start to leverage automation and advanced intelligence to digitize and automatically optimize the complex, manual processes that underpin their day-to-day operations and unlock their full execution capacity.

“Using an execution tool like Celonis, we are able to get tactical insights in very short periods of time,” said Don Williams, Senior Director of Global Process Excellence at Uber. “Celonis supports business execution at Uber by allowing us to look at processes all over the world and measure them in the same object way.”

Thinking in terms of execution capacity is a mindset change that goes beyond tweaking existing business processes, to overhauling them for maximum possible delivery capacity. Be it how many vehicles you can build, how many invoices you can process or how many customer queries you can resolve in a day; only by thinking in terms of your maximum capacity can your business truly fire on all cylinders and out-execute the competition.