The field of business process management (BPM) plays a crucial role in enhancing organizational efficiency and aligning operational workflows with strategic goals. As companies strive to optimize their processes, the integration of advanced tools and methodologies becomes essential. This industry is focused on streamlining operations, improving performance, and ensuring that resources are utilized effectively to drive overall business success.
Caspar Jans, Director of Celonis Process Management, is a leader known for his dedication to refining process management practices, making notable strides in this field. With a distinctive approach to leadership, he emphasizes servant leadership and personal development. His ability to foster growth within his team and balance organizational needs with individual capabilities underscores his commitment to nurturing talent and driving transformational change. His leadership style, characterized by empathy and collaboration, significantly contributes to shaping the industry’s direction and effectiveness.
Celonis stands as a prominent player in the BPM domain, offering innovative solutions that integrate process management, process mining, orchestration, and automation. The company’s ambition to provide a comprehensive platform for process excellence reflects its dedication to advancing industry standards and enhancing operational efficiency for its clients. Through its cutting-edge tools and strategic focus, Celonis continues to lead the way in driving process improvement and business success.
Let’s explore how Caspar’s visionary leadership is transforming business processes with innovative solutions!
Journey Through Business Process Management and Transformation
Caspar has pursued a master’s degree in industrial engineering and management science at the Eindhoven University of Technology, where one of the optional courses that he took was called “Processes & Systems.” Caspar shares, “The beauty of its logic appealed to me.”
He graduated on the applicability of process simulation for the consultancy practice. His early career showed him the ropes of business in the finance and the manufacturing industry. Eventually, Caspar ended up first with a major developer and seller of BPM software and then arrived in Celonis. Caspar believes, “All positions I’ve ever held ultimately led up to where I am now.”
Ensuring Strategic Alignment and Effective Integration
As the Director of Celonis Process Management, The most important thing for Caspar is to provide his clients with the best possible advice on how to implement the concept of process management and to provide guidance on how to best integrate the newly acquired process management capabilities into the existing and world-leading process mining capabilities of Celonis.
One of the most important objectives of BPM is to facilitate internal and external alignment between the strategic objectives and the resources of an organization. Caspar shares, “Me and my team know what to do. We split up the work and align frequently if we are still all on track. If not, we reshuffle some work packages to be aligned and on track.” “The most important element for me is that everybody in the team understands why we are doing the things we do and how they contribute to the good of the company as a whole,” he added.
Fostering Growth through Servant Leadership
Caspar describes his leadership, saying, “I truly believe in servant leadership, and I have a rather feminine leadership style, which seeks common ground and nurturing rather than directing at the risk of conflict.” Caspar likes to find the strengths in people and enable them to grow stronger by balancing the needs of the organization with the desires and capabilities of the individuals. He shares, “I’m a human being and colleague first, and I try to shape my interactions with my colleagues based on this principle.” “I provide guard rails in order to create an environment that encourages trial and error, which is the fastest way to grow,” he added.
An Approach to Building Valuable Connections
Caspar shares, “I love to interact with people, I am quite an extravert personality and have no problem striking a conversation with a total stranger on a wide variety of topics.” “Even if you have no idea of the person you are interacting with, for example, by accepting an invitation to connect on LinkedIn from someone you’ve never met or don’t know at all, will bring you anything, the only way to find is to interact and try,” he added. Caspar asserts, “Shying away from communication will rob you of the possibility of future potential value.”
Once, Caspar was asked to deliver a guest lecture on BPM for a university in Indonesia because he was connected to someone in the Netherlands. Remembering that incident, he shared that It was a great honor for him. Caspar did many guest lectures online because of the COVID pandemic that was going on at the time. Nevertheless, 250 students and professionals showed up, which is a great testament to the organizing professor, with whom he is still in contact. Caspar believes, “It’s better to steal with pride than to produce something inferior, so the more people you are connected with, the higher the probability that you will learn something you can reuse. For me, it’s that simple.”
Balancing Automation and Human Effort
At Celonis, most of the work they do still relies on human effort. By acknowledging the fact, Caspar accepts, “Yes, we automate as much as we can, but it also means that you can replace some of that work with other and different types of human effort.” Giving an example, he justified that, “If you automate the way you receive, verify and process invoices, you might use fewer Accounts Payable Clerks, but you will probably need 1 or 2 automation experts to keep the automation part running.” “Thus, no matter how you look at it, if you focus on making the effort of the people more effective and efficient, then your process performance will benefit,” he added.
Leveraging Diverse Learning Sources and Academic Collaboration
To stay informed about the latest trends and advancements, Caspar listens to relevant podcasts. He believes, “Podcasts you listen to don’t necessarily need to be exactly on topic; even in adjacent fields, you can learn a lot about how the direction certain topics develop in.” He highlighted the podcast of Simon Sinek called “A Bit of Optimism,” which provides wonderful insight into the sometimes unorthodox way that people might deal with challenging situations.
Apart from listening to podcasts, Caspar also likes to read articles, blogs, and contributions on platforms like LinkedIn to stay current. He stays closely connected with the developments in the academic world and the research they conduct. Caspar shares, “I would like to collaborate with academic researchers in an attempt to provide insights to them on what the business side of this equation is looking for.” As a consequence, he tries to participate in the annual BPM Conference and actively contributes to research that is being done on the topics around BPM.
Mastering Public Speaking and Facilitation
Reciting his first public speaking experience, Caspar shares, “It was around 150 people ranging from 8 to 80 years old at the age of 14 because of my astronomy hobby, and even though that was a nerve-racking experience, it also got me hooked on presenting.” About a decade later, and early on in his career, Caspar had the opportunity to be formally trained in facilitation techniques due to a behavioral change program Celnois was going to run on a global scale. That program taught him so much about how to work with groups and get the best out of them.
Caspar still takes best practices from that in his day to day work with clients and his team. He emphasizes, “Look at the field of BPM, being able to connect with executives and other professionals at our clients and being able to work with groups to flesh out exactly how they can and or should be implementing BPM is a very important part of my work.” He believes, “All the experience and training I’ve had on presenting and facilitation certainly paid off for me.”
Navigating the Fluidity of Work-Life Balance
It is very difficult to constantly maintain a good balance. He shares, “The imbalances typically come and go in waves, followed by quieter times to reconnect and rebalance.” “I try to do is to put a cap on the amount of time that I travel, and this does not always work to be honest, but at least it is my ambition,” he added. After the COVID pandemic, online meetings are no longer a question; it’s almost the new normal. However, Caspar believes, “I do work more effectively if I can meet my clients and colleagues in person from time to time.” He reserves time in his schedule to cater for important events in the life of his partner and children, and again, to be honest. However, that also doesn’t always work out. So, Caspar has a lot of conversations with his partner, who keeps everything rolling like clockwork at the home front, and this enables him to sometimes put just that little bit extra focus on the work front, and sometimes this goes the other way as well.
Advice for Aspiring BPM Professionals
Caspar gives the most important advice to starting professionals is, “First dive deep into the business side of the company. Do a couple of tours around the business and, in parallel, start to develop your presentation skills, your facilitation skills and the required process management theory.” “Only having a theoretical background might make you a wonderful consultant, but your credibility will be lacking,” he added. Before knowing his passion early on in his career, Caspar first spent around ten years learning the tricks of the trade by taking various roles in process harmonization projects, ERP implementation projects, logistics, purchasing, supply chain and strategy implementation programs.
Caspar shares, “I had the pleasure of being part of a leadership team for the setup of a purchasing shared service center on a global scale.” It provided him with more practical experience in running transformation projects. Subsequently, he moved into more specific BPM roles and ultimately moved to a BPM vendor to help clients.
Driving the Future of Process Excellence
Caspar asserts, “If there is one thing that the founders of Celonis understood and still understand incredibly well, that is that the motto should be: Process first.” “There is no point in aligning resources if your business processes are not aligned first,” he added. Caspar shares, “One of the reasons for me to choose to work at and for Celonis is the ambitious goal they have set for themselves to be the first company in the world offering a single platform to take care of your process management, process mining, orchestration and automation.”
Celonis is moving in that direction at a tremendous pace. He says, “My aspiration is to support our organization with as much experience and guidance as possible on how to develop the best and most to-the-point process management capabilities in the market in the near future.” In the end, it is the combination of these four capabilities that enables companies to be more effective in managing and continually improving their processes and their execution. Caspar has a strong external orientation to make sure that Celonis stays on course when developing its capabilities. Also, he tries to give back to the BPM community by publishing content and podcast episodes together with his co-host, Russell Gomersall.
