We have the pleasure to talk about the Process Mining Software company Lana Labs with one of the founders.

Tell us a bit about you and Lana Labs!

Hi, my name is Rami-Habib Eid-Sabbagh and I’m one of the co-founders and managing directors of Lana Labs GmbH. Lana Labs is one of the leading providers for Process Mining Software and is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. My two co-founders Karina, Thomas and I founded Lana Labs in 2016 and aimed at providing an entirely cloud-based process mining software from day one. Today, we offer the most advanced process mining technology enabling global organizations across all sectors to continuously improve their value streams.

If you asked me to describe in a nutshell what LANA does, I would answer the following: We make companies better every day. LANA Process Mining allows organizations to analyze and optimize business and production processes of any complexity to sustainably improve business performance. With LANA Process Mining we developed unique capabilities to automatically analyze process data and provide insights to make companies smarter, more efficient and faster. The software helps organizations in any industry to get a clear picture of their process landscape, identify bottlenecks and highlight improvement potential. 

We believe that process optimization has to be a continuous effort in any organization. Our team develops a process mining software that not only provides analysis for individual processes but generates a holistic view of the overall performance and optimization potential of the organization. 

A big part of our Corporate Identity is our approach to sustainability. With our technology, we help organizations to increase efficiency, make better use of their resources and thus to get more sustainable and reduce their CO2 footprint. In addition, we support a magellanic penguin colony in Chile and the adherent research project by adopting a penguin for each license sold and each new employee onboarded. The company’s penguin’s name is “LANA”.

Where did the idea of building that process mining tool come up? Why did you start your endeavour in the first place?

Actually, if you dive deep into the history of Lana Labs, the foundation for the idea was already laid when my co-founder Thomas worked as Process Analyst at IBM and had to optimize a vast amount of business processes more than ten years ago. He soon found out that analyzing business processes with hundreds of different variants is not possible without the help of suitable software. He started to search for possibilities to automate process analysis and identified process mining as the technology to analyze complex business processes. Thomas later decided to write his Master at TU Eindhoven, Netherlands, on Conformance Checking which, by the way, later was one of the main process mining innovations that we brought into the process mining when we launched LANA Process Mining.

Now you are probably wondering when Karina and I came into the game. Let’s get to that now :-) 

Thomas and I first met at a BPM conference in Clermont-Ferrand in 2011. Back then I was doing my PhD studies at Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany. After Prof. Jan Mendling, Thomas PhD supervisor changed to WU Vienna for his professorship, Thomas decided to join the business process technology group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute. During many table soccer games we found out that we do not only share our love for table soccer but that we also shared the same passion for process optimization and for founding our own company. 

We both focused our PhD studies at the HPI on End-to-End process optimization and Process Mining. Of course, research is a big part when you are doing your PhD. Hence, both of us studied the existing process mining market and available process mining tools. We noticed that all existing process mining tools did not go beyond simple process discovery. Organizations using the available tools were only able to see the process flow of an existing process but not much more. Based on these findings we developed the idea to create a new process mining software that goes beyond process mining and enables organizations to automatically get insights on their business processes using machine learning.

During a workshop at the Potsdam Entrepreneurship Experience Lab (PEEL), which was organized by HPI Design School and Potsdam Transfer, we met our third founder Karina who worked back then as Technology Scout at Inpro. Karina took part in the workshop to find new innovative technologies. She shared our excitement about our idea from the first minute and we soon found out that all three of us have a mutual level of humour and fun and that we were all ready to kick off something entirely new. 

We then refined our idea together and decided to start Lana Labs to bring new innovations to the process mining market. We developed an innovative process mining software that enables organizations to automatically analyze and optimize complex processes and make the life of employees easier.

The first innovations in LANA Process Mining included for example automated conformance checks as well as root-cause-analysis which hadn’t been available in any other tools before. We were the first ones to offer more than simple process discovery and LANA is today one of the leading process mining tools offering in-depth process analysis based on a high-performance technology stack. Coming in with a technical background it was important to us to ensure that LANA could be used by anyone with any other IT-system. For this reason, we developed the open Lana REST API which makes it easy for cloud developers and IoT developers to integrate and use the Lana API to connect LANA Process Mining to a worldwide ecosystem of other software and hardware providers and extend it with individual functionality.

Though we have grown the company to an international team of more than 40 process- and IT-experts, we are still working very closely with research institutions to stay on top of new innovations and offer our clients cutting edge capabilities even for complex process optimization projects. And of course, we also still get together regularly to continue our tabletop soccer games :-)

LANA Process Mining: What is it about?

Today, there is massive amount of data available in most of the organizations. However, often the data is not used at all or only a small portion can be analyzed. Our software, LANA Process Mining, leverages all data available and provides the technical capabilities to automatically analyze this data, identify patterns and recommend actions for improvement.

We focused our development efforts from day one on building a process mining tool that enables a very granular analysis of business and production processes. The main concept behind LANA Process Mining is to automate and simplify the complex analysis and optimization of end-to-end processes so that anybody is able to use process mining. 

Our software includes capabilities for visualizing business processes, automatic conformance checks and machine-learning-based root-cause analyses. In addition, we added integrated smart dashboards to provide a day-to-day management tool for complete KPI monitoring. The software can be used with any common web-browser, no installation required. However, we know that some clients prefer to have an on-premises solution instead of a SaaS subscription, hence we are offering both.

The tool is developed using technologies such as Scala, Elixir, and Angular being able to scale vertically as well as horizontally and easily cater to big data requirements. Through our open REST-APIs and our LANA-R and LANA-Python packages LANA Process Mining can be easily extended with additional functionality like prediction, simulation and cater to the individual needs of customers and consultancies as well as academia.

As our aim always was to create a software that does more than just process discovery we put a lot of effort into new, innovative capabilities. Hence, LANA Process Mining for example includes automatic target-actual analysis of process flows as well as waiting and execution times. Our integrated automatic root-cause analysis as well as further automated analyses insights give organizations all relevant information to make better informed decisions.

With our upcoming capabilities regarding automated recommendation and predictions, we will further extend the usage of LANA Process Mining. We are very proud that we were able to develop a complex machine learning algorithm that makes LANA Process Mining unique on the market and provides our clients valuable insights into previously unknown process flows. We are already excited to launch new innovations that we currently develop throughout the year. So watch out for LANA!

Our software is used by healthcare institutions to optimize the patient processes in hospitals, manufacturers use to increase process stability and the output of their production processes. In the utilities sector, our customers establish process controlling for continuous improvement and increasing automation of their processes, just to name a few examples of use cases. 

If you could characterise LANA Process Mining in one sentence without superlative adjectives (e.g., “best”, “fastest”, “most accurate”) and not mentioning competitors, this sentence would be…?

LANA Process Mining is easy to use and empowers organizations to have full control of their business processes and leverage data to continuously and sustainably optimize business performance, compliance and competitiveness.