Celosphere 2022: Bayer’s Timo Peters shares CoE blueprint

Speaking at Celosphere 2022, Peters grouped his 10 tips into basic, advanced and master categories. Those categories work given that enterprises are at various points in their Celonis journey for process mining and execution management.

Here's a look at Peters' top 10 tips for scaling process mining by category.

Basic

Execute live demos of process mining with real use cases and data. These demos should encompass Celonis Process Explorer, Conformance Checker, Root Cause Analysis and Automation.

Peters has executed more than 420 demo sessions covering the purpose of process mining, capabilities and modes of working.

According to Peters, the main thing live demos do is identify sponsors and champions as well as active people who can be a source of use cases. Another pro tip: Never leave without agreed follow ups, names of additional user groups and defined next steps.

Ensure value creation with a mode of operation. Peters' presentation referred to a funnel that starts with strategy, data and operations, identifies value and change management tasks and then moves through to cash flow and realized value.

The trick of this funnel as a mode of operations is ensuring the tasks are done along the way. For instance:

When you're framing potential value, make sure there's a business owner and value realization managers. Develop a business case, controllers and business owners to sign off and align on business value baseline, targets and roadmap.
When validating value, track realization with data. Initiate a value governance board and detail the tasks that drive the value realization. Also make sure there are task owners and deadlines. Identify gaps and mitigation actions as needed.
When realizing value, monitor and execute. Also adapt and identify gaps and risk against targets and milestones. Operationalize value realization to business stakeholders.
When evolving process mining, monitoring and execution remains critical. The plan is similar to the value realization funnel with more maintenance and communication.

Ensure strong governance. For a CoE to stay on track with delivering value, a strong governance framework is a must, said Peters.

For steering and decisions, CoE's should have a cross-company executive value stakeholder board. At Bayer, this board ensures alignment between Bayer and partners on vision, direction and value realization. There should also be a business value realization board to ensure, enforce and accelerate value realization.

On the operations side, Bayer has a Hub Board for tech related collaboration planning and cross-company process mining communities to exchange functional knowledge.

In addition, there are several operation meetings for weekly funnel reviews, prioritization, value milestone decisions, sign-off and sprint planning and recap.

Adopt the Process Mining Funnel. Bayer deploys the funnel to keep control over process mining value realization and execution. This funnel should detail the number of use cases per phase, value, change from previous week and additional filters to drill down into operations. An advanced approach includes usage of Celonis EMS, learning progress tracking and performance data integration. Ultimately, this funnel can support lifecycle tracking of each use case.

Scale the CoE. Peters said you'll need to add talent and expertise as you scale processes and use cases under the CoE. The pilot phase is one process with one to three use cases and one or two full-time resources. The next phase is 2 to 3 processes with 6 to 12 use cases with 4 to 6 full-time resources. At scale, an enterprise CoE covers 4 or more processes, 20 or more use cases and 6-full time resources to start.

Also see: Why and how to scale Celonis Centers of Excellence (CoE) to grow value |Study: Accelerating Business Transformation with a Process Mining Center of Excellence (CoE)

Use good change management practices. For the CoE to work well you need humans in the middle of the process mining effort. Increase awareness about process mining and value, deliver better service, share knowledge, use process mining as part of a daily routine and continually improve.

Advanced

Continuously evolve your CoE. Peters said he follows a plan/do/check/act principle. The main point is to be fast to adjust and accept failures. The key to CoE success is adjusting to situations quickly.

Be ahead of the game. While CoEs initially start off as reactive with a focus on agreement, use cases, data and approvals, the ultimate goal is to be active and lower cycle times to 1 month to 3 months.

To be an active CoE, do the following:

Make data connections before use cases start.
Create teams with daily working meetings.
Scope and define value before use cases start.
Gain approval of business cases and resource allocation from required teams.
Get executive commitment before starting a use case.
Engage and enable subject matter experts before the start of development.

Recharge investment with distributed models. Peters said distributing process transformation capabilities need to be available to everyone.

Master

Evolve from digital process twin to ecosystem twin. An end-to-end view of processes across Bayer creates a digital process twin that visualizes the business across supply and distribution, customer, product and services and finance and administration. Evolving to create an ecosystem process twin can identify the root cause of issues and fix them. This end-to-end MRI of processes enables enterprises to zoom out and optimize on an ongoing basis.