Munich Regional Court has granted an injunction against SAP in Germany over its Signavio Process Intelligence software, finding that it infringes a process-mining patent held by Munich-based Celonis. According to JUVE Patent, which reported the judgment on 16 October 2026, the decision came from the court’s 7th Civil Chamber (case ID 7 O 12849/25), on a panel chaired by presiding judge Oliver Schön with judges Katalin Tözsér and Florian Schweyer. The asserted patent is EP 3 139 274, “Method for determining a net lead time between process stages of a process instance”, granted to Celonis SE on application EP16186722.1 with a priority date of 4 September 2015 and an anticipated expiry of 31 August 2036. It covers a computer-implemented method of calculating net throughput times between process steps — the practical trick being the exclusion of non-business hours, nights and weekends, from a process duration figure that companies use to judge the efficiency of their own workflows.
Two things about the order matter more than the win itself. First, the court did not stop at the injunction: per JUVE Patent it also ordered SAP to render information and accounts for the infringing acts and established liability for damages. Second, it refused SAP’s request to stay the infringement proceedings pending the parallel nullity action SAP filed at the Federal Patent Court in March 2026 (case ID 6 Ni 17/26) — the panel held the cited prior art neither anticipated the claimed invention nor made it obvious. On construction, the dispute turned on whether Signavio stores the process log in main memory the way the claim requires and whether storing process steps in “neighbouring addresses” reaches a column format. The court sided with Celonis: a column-oriented storage format satisfies the requirement that steps be held in neighbouring addresses sorted by a time attribute. It also rejected SAP’s argument that each process step needs a globally unique identifier, holding that uniqueness arising from the process-instance identifier combined with the step description is enough. SAP has appealed; Celonis, the report says, intends to enforce.
What it changes
A German nullity action filed seven months before judgment bought SAP nothing. This is the bifurcation gap in its plainest form: the infringement court decides infringement on its own timetable and stays only if it thinks the patent is likely to fall, and here it did not. If you are defending a German infringement suit, the planning assumption has to be that you will face an enforceable injunction while validity is still unresolved — which means the design-around decision and the licence decision run on the infringement calendar, not the nullity calendar. The corollary for the attack side is that a validity case has to be strong on its face at the stay stage, not merely pending; filing it and waiting is not a defence. Where the stay motion is the whole ballgame, the quality of the prior-art record is what decides it, and that work belongs at the start of the case, not after the hearing date is set (invalidity and nullity search).
“We use a columnar store” and “our IDs are composite” just lost in Munich. Both of SAP’s non-infringement positions were architecture arguments — our storage layout is different, our identifiers are not globally unique — and both failed. That is the transferable holding for every analytics, observability and data-platform vendor with freedom-to-operate exposure in Germany: a claim written in 2015 terms about memory layout and identifiers can be read onto a modern columnar engine and onto composite keys. If your clearance file on a European analytics patent rests on an implementation distinction at the data-structure level, re-open it, and have the opinion address what the claim feature requires functionally rather than what your code happens to be called. Clearance reviews for this class of software need to read the claims against the actual storage and indexing design (freedom-to-operate analysis), because that is the level at which this court worked.
The patent runs to 2036, so this is not a problem you can outlast. With roughly a decade of term left on EP 3 139 274 and a German injunction in hand against a feature of a global SaaS product, the burden lands on product and go-to-market as much as on counsel: geographic feature gating, contract carve-outs, and migration paths for German customers of the enjoined functionality. Two groups should act this week without being party to anything. Buyers of enterprise analytics software should check whether their agreements carry IP indemnity and a continuity remedy when a vendor feature is enjoined in one country — a German-only injunction is exactly the scenario most indemnity clauses handle badly. And competitors in process mining should treat the construction given to EP 3 139 274 as a map of what Celonis can now assert, because the accounting and damages order means the commercial negotiation that follows will be informed by SAP’s own usage data.
Finally, note where this ruling sits in the war, because the venue choice is instructive. JUVE Patent records that SAP entered process mining by acquiring Berlin-based Signavio in 2021; that Celonis brought an antitrust action in the Northern District of California in spring 2025 over fees for third-party access to SAP-held data, most of which was dismissed in June 2025 with leave to amend; that SAP then sued Celonis at the Düsseldorf local division of the UPC on EP 3 913 496 (UPC_CFI_558/2025) and in the District of Delaware on four US patents; and that Celonis answered in Texas, in Munich, and at the Munich local division of the UPC on EP 3 765 962. The first substantive decision in that sprawl came from a national German court, ahead of UPC oral hearings scheduled for the end of November in Düsseldorf and February in Munich. For portfolio owners choosing where to strike, the national Munich route is still the faster first blow, and running it alongside UPC actions on different patents is now mainstream practice rather than a hedge.