Mining Gold from Data

Every organisation on earth runs on processes — sequences of steps that move work from start to finish. For decades, those processes were invisible. Managers drew flowcharts of how they thought things worked, but nobody could see how things actually worked in practice. Then a Dutch professor named Wil van der Aalst had an idea: what if you could extract the real process directly from the data that computer systems already record?That idea became process mining — a discipline that grew from a PhD thesis at TU Eindhoven into a global industry. Three of van der Aalst's students built Celonis, now valued at over thirteen billion dollars and used by the largest companies in the world to discover inefficiencies they never knew existed. This book tells the story of how one academic insight created an entire field, and how a small team in Munich turned it into one of Europe's most remarkable technology companies.