Celonis Process Explorer and Variant Explorer: What’s the difference?

One Celonis user wanted to better understand Variant Explorer and Process Explorer. They reached out to the Celonis community through Celopeers and asked how the two tools were different. Celopeers community members jumped in with the answer and a way for the original poster to learn more.

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Celopeers member asked how Celonis Process Explorer and Variant Explorer are different

Variant Explorer shows all the different paths (or variants) a specific process takes within an organization. Process Explorer, on the other hand, does not show a specific process path (or variants) for a group of cases, but instead shows the most common activities and connections filtered on case frequency by default.

As this question is one of the most popular posts on Celopeers with over 1,000 views, I thought it would be helpful to provide a bit more information about Variant Explorer and Process Explorer and links to the Celonis Academy training courses for each one.

What is Celonis Variant Explorer?

Variant Explorer is a Celonis Analysis tool that helps you explore how a specific process flows through your organization.

If we think about a process as a road trip, each process variant would be a potential route. Each activity within a process would be a waypoint along a route, and the connections between activities are like the roads that connect the stops. And, each trip a person makes along a particular route would be a case.

Using Variant Explorer, you can see the individual activities within each process variant and the frequency of each variant (based on number of cases). You can also compare variants to each other and see metrics for individual variants, such as Activity Frequency and Throughput Time.
In short, Variant Explorer gives you a quick way to see whether most process cases follow an acceptable flow of activities or not and helps you develop your first analysis questions.

To learn more about Variant Explore, take the Celonis Academy course Use the Variant Explorer, from which the above video was taken.

What is Celonis Process Explorer?

Process Explorer is a Celonis Analysis tool that helps you explore how process activities are connected. Instead of showing us specific process variants, it shows the most common activities and connections.

Using our road trip analogy again, Process Explorer isn’t showing the different routes (variants) that people actually took on a given trip (case). Process Explorer shows us which waypoints (activities) and roads (connections) are the most common along the journey.

Process Explorer is extremely useful for finding infrequent activities, which can be difficult to spot using Variant Explore as these rare activities may not appear in common variants.

To learn more about Variant Explore, take the Celonis Academy course Use the Process Explorer, from which the above video was taken.