Jeff Cowan from GE Power: Why Business Leaders shouldn't miss the Superfluid World Tour
As a Senior Director of Continuous Improvement and Optimization at GE Power, I can tell you when it comes to processes, we at GE Power felt that we always designed the best processes. However, when it was all said and done, we designed processes that were aspirational. Processes that we really couldn’t measure to know whether our improvements were realized and sustained over time. We lacked the capability to really know our processes and how they were performing. Regarding data, we’ve always had a ton of it. However, we lacked the capability to be able to use it in such a way as to be able to visualize our true processes and know which dimensions were having the most impact.
Now, we’re a big Lean company, and our company has invested significantly throughout the 20 years to provide the tools and expertise to all employees so that they can effect change, improve the way we work, and transform our company. We have had a lot of success along the way, but it was hard, and still is. But when we first saw Celonis, and other similar competitor products, we realized how much easier it can be.
We started to think about how much time we could have saved, and still can save, to generate real value for our company. Now we have the capability to visualize our process data in a new way that exposes friction points and improvement opportunities—helping our company to become more productive through common and more automated processes, especially in our Finance and Operations processes. That’s why I was thrilled to accept my invitation to be a keynote speaker at the Celonis Superfluid World Tour!
Celonis is key to our efforts in accelerating operations, adding intelligence and agility across departments, and removing process friction. On tour, I’m going to share how our team is able to achieve so much with Process Mining, and some strategies that you can use to achieve the same results.
Topics I Will Cover at the Superfluid World Tour
Here's a preview of what I plan to talk about on tour, including some of my team's strategies for continuous improvement and process excellence, and how we're using Celonis to support these initiatives:
Increasing Process Transparency: Many of our processes are global, making them immensely complex. Too complex, in fact, to find hidden inefficiencies and friction points without the proper tools. Celonis helps my process excellence team and I by providing complete and total transparency of our end-to-end processes, allowing us to identify every process step that doesn’t conform to our process standards, and every opportunity for improvement. This transparency ensures that no opportunity or challenge goes undetected, and enables us to make more effective and proactive business decisions.
Driving More Intelligent, Data-Driven Discussions: As previously stated, my team at GE has always had a lot of data, but we never had an efficient way to organize it in a digestible way that drives objective discussion. We now use Celonis to collect this data from our systems, and transform it into visual representations of our process that can be easily understood by people from every department. This drives purely data-driven and collaborative discussions, which GE Power has dreamed of having for many years. This helps us add enterprise agility, accelerate our decision-making process, and prioritize our actions so that we’re always making the most impactful choices first.
Changing How We Generate Real Value: We’re using Celonis to help improve our Order-to-Cash and Purchase-to-Pay processes—specifically in optimizing working capital management and improving our cash position. With Celonis, we finally have the capability to ensure all invoices are paid on time to minimize lost discounts and improve supplier satisfaction; change and rework is reduced and/or eliminated making us more productive; customer invoices are created on time and cash collections are completed more timely. These are but a few ways Celonis will help us drive real value for our company.
Sessions That Make the World Tour Worthwhile:
If you’re a process enthusiast, then attending one of the Superfluid World Tour events should be a high priority—and not just because Celonis knows how to throw a great party (they do). Last year, I had a great time at Celosphere connecting with business leaders from some of the world’s largest companies like Uber, Siemens, Zalando, and Vodafone.
I can tell you from personal experience that events like this, where business leaders come together to help each other work towards a common goal, are an extremely rare occurrence. That’s what makes the Superfluid World Tour in particular so valuable to process excellence teams like mine. Here’s some of the content I’m most excited for at the Superfluid World Tour:
Special Guest Keynote Speakers: Business leaders from around the world will share Process Mining insights and best practices, including Al Gore, Tom Davenport, and other process excellence experts.
Department-Focused Sessions: Business executives and process improvement teams from any department can access sessions focused on showing how Process Mining can be used to improve any specific process, from IT, to Finance, and more.
Meet the Celonis Team: Meet with the Process Mining experts themselves, and ask their executives and data scientists any questions you might have, face-to-face.
It’s a Free, One-Day Event: Now you have no excuse to miss seeing me speak!
Ready to Join Us On Tour?
I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences with like-minded process optimization teams, and show how you too can accelerate your business operations with Celonis. Check out the official page of the Superfluid World Tour to see if an event is coming to your city, and claim your ticket.
See you there!
Innovative IT & Process Leader Inspiring Collaboration, Streamlining Processes & Leveraging Technology to Improve ROI
