Connected IRM: Celonis and ServiceNow deliver integrated solutions at scale

Rob Popovic, Global Head of Indirect Sales at Celonis, met with Acceleration Economy Network analyst Tom Smith at the Celosphere News Desk during the two-day event in Munich, Germany. The pair discussed how the ServiceNow and Celonis partnership has been driving customer wins in 2022, the new Connected IRM solution and what’s ahead for the partnership and Celonis Connection Solutions in 2023.

https://delivery-p141552-e1488202.adobeaemcloud.com/adobe/assets/urn:aaid:aem:3ff1d273-f666-4c0c-bff4-4edc53bfba86/as/PuztufVNRghmqvkppZjTe1.jpg
https://videos.celonis.com/watch/PuztufVNRghmqvkppZjTe1

The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for readability.

ServiceNow + Celonis: Strategic partnership

Tom Smith: Let's start out with just really an overview of this partnership, and I asked that in the context of, it was announced just a little over a year ago, the partnership with ServiceNow, and be good to get an update and then I know there's some new developments that we'd like to focus on as well.

Rob Popovic: Talking about one of my favorite topics, our partnership with ServiceNow.

When you have two generational leaders like Alex Rinke and Bill McDermott behind a partnership aligned on a generational opportunity to help businesses transform by bringing intelligence and action together in a way never thought possible, the bar for success is set pretty high. So, in the last year we focused on... We've made tremendous progress. We focused on the right use cases. We'll talk a little bit about some of those wins in the marketplace.

We've gotten ourselves to a place operationally where we have an integrated fluid go to market motion. We've established a co-selling model where we bidirectionally sell one another’s software to our customers. We've activated and fired up our global system integrator ecosystem because it does take an ecosystem to win. The kinds of problems we're solving take an ecosystem.

And right now, we're winning in the marketplace, and I couldn't be more thrilled to see customers coming to Celonis, ServiceNow, and their trusted systems integrators and saying, "We need your help to move our business forward.”

Find, Frame and Fix broken work

Tom Smith: And I think that, their need is, seems to me it's captured in this phrase that I understand you use Find, Frame, Fix. Correct? Can you explain that in some more detail?

Rob Popovic: Yeah. So, every generational opportunity needs a generational problem, and we've identified the problem, we call it broken work. So, what is broken work? If you think about enterprise organizations, work is broken and it's really the way we're forced to work that's broken.

What that means is, organizations have fragmented, rigid IT systems, they've got disconnected processes, they've got organizational silos, compounded by external factors like inflation, supply chain disruption, where all the pressure of making workflow falls on the people. The system is broken, work is broken. So, what we've developed with ServiceNow is a new approach, a new formula to fix work, to transform businesses and help them achieve the outcomes that matter most of them that we call Find, Frame and Fix.

So, Celonis finds and frames broken work by X-raying business processes, uncovering inefficiencies in those processes, then framing the impact of those inefficiencies against the metrics that matter most to that business.

ServiceNow then fixes what's broken with their NOW platform, the market-leading workflow and hyper-automation platform. And the fix can come in different shapes and sizes. It can be something as sophisticated as ServiceNow, modernizing a workflow, so we uncover an inefficiency in procurement and the organization wants to do procurement differently, that they would build the workflow on ServiceNow and create a modern experience.

It could be something as straightforward as remediating an inefficiency that we uncover and that would lead to ServiceNow deploying a simple automation like RPA right from the platform. But this combination of Find, Frame and Fix makes so much sense to customers. It addresses the biggest challenges that they're facing and it also allows their trusted partners, our trusted partner community to deliver the promise of transformation for businesses because it really does take an ecosystem.

Tom Smith: And just what came to mind for me is when you're talking about that Find and Frame component of it, big focus here at Celosphere, on Process Sphere™, new products, new technology being brought to bear, to me that makes that solution, the Find, Frame, Fix model even more powerful.

Rob Popovic: Absolutely.

Connected Integrated Risk Management (IRM)

Tom Smith: You're also announcing here this week something called Connected Solutions with ServiceNow. Can you talk more about what that is, and from a customer benefit perspective, what's unique about it?

Rob Popovic: Great question. So, we're really again on this journey in our partnership with ServiceNow, and listening to our customers, listening to our partners, listening to what the marketplace is saying, it is telling us there where they need the most help. We've determined that bringing intelligence and actions together, centered around use cases is the winning ticket. Effectively, that's what connected solutions are. So, we bring Celonis and ServiceNow technology together delivered by a partner around a customer use case or a customer problem very focused.

Tom Smith: That is supply chain.

Rob Popovic: So, a great example of supply chain management.

I'll give an example here, a large global apparel maker that we all know, turn to their trusted systems integrator in Celonis and ServiceNow and said, "I'm having major challenges managing my inventory levels, can you help?" So, we're now in that process of implementing Find, Frame and Fix. Celonis is showing them how their supply chain works at a level they've never thought possible. We're finding inefficiencies in those ERP processes. And then we're mapping with ServiceNow, the appropriate workflow to fix what's broken. Great example of a connected solution brought together by Celonis, ServiceNow, and a strategic partner that's aimed at a customer problem.

There's another one I'd also like to touch on that super meaningful here at Celosphere. It's around risk management. So, if you think about what Celonis does, we talk a lot about driving efficiency in business processes. But when you activate Celonis in a business process or sets of business processes, it really comes down to the lens that you're looking at the data, at the analysis, the insights through, and it comes down to the outcomes that you're looking to drive in your business. So, one is obviously cost improvement.

Another lens is managing risk and what we learn through partnering with ServiceNow and partnering very closely with our community of systems integrators (SIs), there's a massive opportunity for Celonis and ServiceNow to deliver continuous control monitoring, continuous risk management across the entire enterprise landscape at scale, never done before.

So, this week we also announced that we're bringing Connected Integrated Risk Management (IRM) to the marketplace in the US. So, we're very excited about that and we've got a number of other strategic partners that are looking at which connected solutions they want to own and bring to market and solve customer problems.

Also: Supply chain outlook for 2023 revolves around resiliency, optimization, efficiency and a bit of normalcy | McKinsey: These 8 characteristics of resilient supply chains can give your business a competitive advantage | Execution management, process excellence key to outrunning inflation, supply chain woes says Celonis co-CEO

Process mining 2023: Driving connected solutions at scale

Tom Smith: As you look forward into 2023 and your relationship, the partnership with ServiceNow, it's obviously growing, it's evolving, becoming more ambitious. Any thoughts as to where it could go or how it evolves or perhaps how does it help customers in 2023 deal with a lot of the issues they're struggling with today?

Rob Popovic: Yeah, naturally, we continue to make investments on both sides in the partnership, from putting more talent on the partnership to investing our resources to understand how we can make the products work better together, the platforms work better together.

I think what you'll see in 2023... 2022 is really a crawl year for us. Getting this motion started, getting it stood up, getting the right messaging to the marketplace, making sure the messaging resonates with partners, understanding that when you're tackling problems like supply chain management, finance transformation, procurement, reinvention, these are big, big problems. They're complicated problems that require an entire ecosystem to go after and solve. So, '22 was about crawling.

I think we're going to start to walk and run in 2023, and you're going to start to see ServiceNow and Celonis come together around solving more issues in the ERP space, driving connected solutions at scale.

I think as you start to turn around, you're going to start to see the SI community promoting connected solutions as part of their secret sauce, as part of their value proposition to customers. They want to really be the tip of the spear bringing these capabilities together. So, I'm really excited about 2023.