How process mining is making Porsche faster and more efficient
For the past five years, Porsche has been optimizing its processes in partnership with the technology provider Celonis and its process mining model. The objective behind it: to analyze, optimize and control end-to-end processes. With the help of process mining, inefficiencies can be identified and eliminated and costs can be reduced in order to achieve corporate goals.
Optimizing processes is an ongoing task in global corporations such as Porsche AG. There are almost always opportunities to make things more efficient. However, the full potential isn’t always recognized. This is because process optimization often functions as a kind of selective stocktaking, like when it comes to the question: “At what point in the production process can we make procedures more stringent?” For many years, process optimization focused on one process without taking into account the influences that may be acting on it from the outside, through other related processes.
This is exactly what is now changing thanks to process mining technology at Porsche. With the help of this technology, it should now be possible to analyze processes, support them operationally, automate them, and generate added value for the company in the future with the additional use of artificial intelligence.
In collaboration with the subsidiaries MHP and Porsche Digital as well as various internal departments, Roman Striegel and his team from the department of Automatization & Digitization in Logistics have already been working for five years on systematically applying the process mining model to more and more areas at Porsche. “Before we came across the process mining tool, we analyzed process data using Excel spreadsheets, business intelligence tools and various analytics tools,” Striegel explains. “In contrast, the advantage of process mining lies in its holistic analytical approach. It allows us to put all dimensions and influencing factors that affect a process into context with each other and therefore create added value.”
The advantages of process mining
Process mining offers the possibility to graphically map processes as they actually take place in reality and compare them with the target state. Is everything really going according to plan? Where are there deviations and why? How can these deviations be avoided or implemented as part of the standard process? These are all questions that can be answered with the help of process mining.
With its technology partner Celonis, Porsche is relying on the market leader in process mining. Celonis offers a platform that has been customized to Porsche-specific requirements and is now increasingly being fed with data in order to extract information from it. The process mining team then makes recommendations for concrete improvements in collaboration with the respective department heads.
“My team and I represent the ‘center of excellence’ for this topic,” says Striegel. “And we’re now trying to set up ‘centers of competence’ in other departments. We see ourselves as enablers and consultants in the implementation of the technologies in the individual projects and are responsible for developing and establishing the topic of process mining across all disciplines. Without the centers of competence in the teams themselves, however, this project wouldn’t succeed.” This means that other departments will not all be dependent on Striegel’s expertise, but gradually be able to feed Celonis with data themselves and ultimately make the right decisions based on the dashboards.
AI will enhance process mining in the future
So far, 450 Porsche employees are already working with the Celonis tool. But Striegel doesn’t think it’s essential to have more and more people involved. He sees greater potential in the implementation of AI. “Perhaps in the future, we’ll only have a few people who actually work with the tool, and both the feeding of data and the derivation of recommended actions will be done by artificial intelligence,” says Striegel.
He and his team have already achieved several milestones. Their next goal is now to integrate data from other service providers to optimize the end-to-end processes even further. Striegel and his colleagues are currently working on a solution to receive the right data from other service providers and have it processed by Celonis.
“It’s important for me to emphasize that process mining builds a bridge between the areas of IT and process management. In IT, we deal with data architecture. Creating process models from this builds a bridge to process management. Our goal is to ultimately achieve the best possible result for the customer,” he says.
The full potential of process mining can only be exploited when all process threads are linked together — ideally across the entire Volkswagen Group. The technology also provides the basis for integrating artificial intelligence such as large language models. In combination with AI, process mining can offer the greatest added value.
Interested in working in development at Porsche? Here is a list of job openings.
About this publication: Porsche is one of the most successful sports car manufacturers. But there’s more to it. Innovation is deeply rooted in the company’s DNA. We started out as a small garage startup more than 75 years ago — today, we build some of the most exciting sports cars in the world. But we can’t shape the future of mobility alone. We have to broaden our horizons, open ourselves up as a company, leave our comfort zone, dive into new technologies and collaborate with new partners. Here, we tell these stories.
