Getting better at what you do by how you do it
Driving Efficiency with Domain-Driven Design Principles
There are countless ways to enhance efficiency within a business. Some approaches focus on incremental improvements, delivering small wins over time. Others, like large-scale transformation projects, provide an opportunity to redefine and optimize operations on a more fundamental level.
When embarking on such transformations, leveraging Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles can serve as a powerful framework. By aligning processes, technology, and organizational structure with business goals, DDD can help create a lean and focused organization capable of thriving in a competitive landscape.
What is Domain-Driven Design?
Domain-Driven Design is traditionally a software development approach that prioritizes a deep understanding of the problem domain—your business—and ensures that systems are built to reflect its unique needs and goals.
While DDD was designed for software, its principles can easily extend to business processes and organizational structures. By focusing on the core business domain, DDD provides a structured way to ensure that every part of an operation is aligned with strategic objectives.
Applying DDD to Your Business
The principles of DDD can help businesses design and optimize processes in several key ways:
- Focus on the Core Domain: Identify the most critical areas of the business—the ones that differentiate you from competitors—and direct your efforts there.
- Model Around Key Concepts: Design your processes and systems around the core business entities and their relationships. This ensures your operations mirror the reality of how your business functions.
- Align Processes with Goals: Use DDD as a guide to ensure every business process contributes to broader organizational objectives.
- Collaborate Across Teams: Encourage close collaboration between subject matter experts, stakeholders, and process teams to accurately reflect business needs in system designs and workflows.
Why DDD Matters for Transformations
Large-scale transformation projects often create the perfect opportunity to take a step back and assess whether your operations truly support your goals. By applying DDD principles, businesses can design processes and systems that aren’t just efficient but strategically aligned.
Michael Plöd, an expert in DDD and author of Hands-On Domain-Driven Design by Example, highlights how DDD encourages organizations to think strategically and design systems that are purpose-built for their unique challenges. The result? Businesses that are more adaptable, focused, and ready to thrive in an ever-changing world.
Whether you’re undertaking a transformation or looking to optimize existing processes, DDD offers a roadmap for aligning your operations with your vision for the future.
If you see good potential for this at your company but are unsure where to start, drop us a note. By applying DDD principles to business processes, a business can design processes that are closely aligned with its core business domain and goals, leading to improved efficiency and effectiveness.
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When “Transformation” Isn’t Transformation
There’s a quiet absurdity in how most organizations approach change. Every few years, a vendor announces the end of support for a version — and suddenly, an entire enterprise scrambles into “transformation mode.” Slide decks get rewritten, budgets inflate, timelines stretch, and the word strategy gets thrown around like confetti.
Utilities Billing — Don't let Watermelon Reporting fool you. Billing sees the red everyday.
When the dashboards look green but your billing team is buried in exceptions—there’s a disconnect.In utilities, billing becomes the silent sinkhole of revenue operations, absorbing every upstream delay, data miss, and failed process. We call it Watermelon Reporting—green on the outside, red on the inside.This post is an ode to the teams who keep the lights on (and the bills going out) despite the chaos—and how the Celonis Utilities Smart Billing App helps them shift from firefighting to forward-looking.
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My journey to building an App I knew Utilities needed — Part 2 (The Beginning)
In Part 2 of My Journey to Building an App I Knew Utilities Needed, I explore how process mining helped a utility uncover the real causes of delays in the New Connection process—insights that traditional BI tools simply couldn't deliver. This post highlights how utilities can move beyond surface-level reporting to truly understand operational bottlenecks, improve customer experience, and strengthen their rate cases with data-driven transparency.
My journey to building an App I knew Utilities needed — Part 1
"For years, utilities have struggled with process inefficiencies that lead to millions in fines, regulatory scrutiny, and a complete breakdown in customer trust. But what if there was a way to cut through the chaos and truly understand what's going wrong? In this first part of my journey, I share how process mining and the Celonis platform opened my eyes to the brutal truth: most companies don't even recognize their real processes. I’m excited to share how my company, The Good Quarter, is on the verge of launching an app that will finally give utilities the insight they need to fix their meter-to-cash process—and stop the cycle of missed opportunities and massive costs.
A Blockbuster in AI Assistance: Google AI Studio's Screen-Sharing Feature
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Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: The World of Object-Centric Process Mining
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Building a Conversational Agent for job aids (RAG Use Case)
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Start with the Question: Turning Data into Insight
Before you touch the data, ask yourself: What do I really want to know? Forget about what the data is; think about what you’re trying to uncover. A good question is specific and meaningful, not just to you but to anyone looking for answers.
Embracing the Opportunities of SAP S/4 HANA Transformations
You hear a lot about the technology risks around S/4 Implementation projects.
What no one is really talking about are the business challenges and what the business can do to address 3 of the most common factors that lead to chaotic and unsuccessful S/4 HANA implementations
Rethinking Metrics: The Power of Object-Centric Process Mining
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Who owns your data?
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Move aside traditional methods.
It’s 2024. I think the continuous improvement folks could use a taste of their own medicine. I’ve outlined a few ways process mining could be used to improve the traditional process mapping methods
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I’m confident you can pick up your smart phone and piece together a significant portion of your life in the past day, month, even years! Can you say the same about your processes at work?
Data Insights to Actionable Signals to Desired Outcomes
Organizations rely on data insights in today's data-driven world to inform their decision-making processes and drive successful outcomes. However, simply collecting and analyzing data is not enough.
We explore the journey from data to insight to action to outcome and what organizations must focus on along the way.
Top 3 reasons why data, analytics and insight are all dressed up and have nowhere to go in your enterprise
In neurology, a condition called ataxia manifests as a lack of muscle control or coordination of voluntary movements, which may be an apt metaphor for this dissonance in the business organization in relation to data.
So what is the solution? What can business leaders do to turn the tide on this trend?