Celonis customers 2022: Here are the 9 things we learned about process excellence

Celonis customers in 2022 focused on efficiency, agility and scaling process excellence to better navigate a host of challenges ranging from inflation to supply chain transformation and sustainability. 

Dr. Detlef Kayser, Member of the Executive Board, Fleet & Technology at Lufthansa Group, summed up 2022 during the Celonis Celosphere 2022 keynote: "What you hear in the news, you'll see in your operations a few minutes later.”

Here’s a look at what we learned from dozens of Celonis customer stories in 2022.

Working capital is more important than ever

Numerous Celonis customers focused on working capital improvements in 2022 amid supply chain disruptions, inflation and business volatility. At Celosphere 2022, BSH Appliance Group outlined how process excellence improved working capital and other business functions. The BSH Appliance Group presentation focused on working capital improvement projects that improve cash flow and help BSH Appliance Group navigate inflation, supply chain disruptions and fluctuations in demand.

Avnet had a similar story. Avnet has integrated Celonis into many departments — including Procurement, Sales, and Finance — to deliver €10-15M of value year-on-year in working capital impact, productivity gains and revenue increases.

Simply put, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable use cases were more important than ever.

• Celonis World Tour 2022 London: Kraft Heinz, Delphi Technologies highlight Accounts Payable process excellence

• How Malvern Panalytical revamped its Accounts Payable processes with Celonis EMS

Supply chain transformation is a top priority

Not surprisingly, supply chain was a big issue in 2022 amid disruption, price volatility and inventory swings. Celonis customers leveraged process mining and execution management to navigate the volatility. 

Reckitt Chief Information and Digitization Officer Filippo Catalano said the company has been "profoundly affected" by supply chain volatility and Celonis is an enabler to manage through those challenges. "The supply chain has been super volatile," said Catalano. 

At the New York stop of Celonis World Tour 2022, Vini Cardoso, Global Tech Finance Director at AB InBev, shared supply chain use cases including fraud detection. "We start with raw materials that are delivered by thousands of trucks on a daily basis," said Cardoso. Having end-to-end visibility into our supply chain is "very important in our case." 

ALDI SÜD has launched its first real-time Celonis Execution Management app for its daily supply chain process performance as part of its broader digital transformation efforts.

Meanwhile, Eurowings leveraged process mining to get a better understanding of its supply chain and value chain as it restarted following the COVID-19 pandemic.

• These 8 characteristics of resilient supply chains can give your business a competitive advantage

Sustainability is becoming operationalized

Multiple customers are melding sustainability and supply chain process excellence. Multiple processes in supply chain, logistics and procurement also apply to sustainability goals. 

A quick tour of sustainability efforts from customers:

• How ALDI SÜD plans to turn sustainability and logistics into a win-win ALDI SÜD has more than 6,500 stores around the world and everyday trucks are shipping goods from central warehouses as often as twice per day. Given that, sustainability and a well-managed carbon footprint are also part of ALDI SÜD’s daily operations and among their key priorities moving forward.

• Corporations need to focus on climate change adaptation, quantifying supply chain risks Corporations need to mitigate their sustainability risks to their supply chains and businesses and focus on adaptation, according to Dr. Parag Khanna, Climate Alpha Founder and CEO and Founder and Managing Partner of Future Map. In addition, Celonis launched two new applications developed in collaboration with Climatiq, EcoVadis and IntegrityNext.

• ABB on sustainability: Just get started! ABB and Celonis are co-developing sustainability tracking, dashboards and processes to reach a net-zero emissions goal by 2030. Also see: 6 steps to operationalize sustainability

There are multiple Centers of Excellence (CoE) approaches

Celonis customers shared best practices for CoEs and scaling process excellence. While approaches differ by company, customers were unanimous that some centralized function needs to partner with business units to deliver value, collaborate and continuously improve. 

Here’s a look at the CoE at scale best practices:

• Celosphere 2022: Bayer’s Timo Peters shares CoE blueprint Bayer's Timo Peters, Center of Excellence (CoE) Lead for Process Mining, shared lessons learned about scaling process mining across large enterprises. Peters’ recommendations are a must read for companies at all points of the process mining journey.

• Celosphere 2022: Here's How Nokia Scaled Process Mining, Execution Management Nokia has scaled up its Celonis Process Mining and Execution Management System (EMS) adoption by focusing on processes with the best returns and connecting to systems with maximum transaction volume.

And other approaches at various enterprises.

• CeloCoE Champions League EMEA #2: The power of cross-company processes and inspiring value approaches

• 4 Digital Improvement Leadership Lessons from Daniel Schönheim, Lufthansa Aviation Training Group

• How Huntsman scaled process excellence, use cases

• World Tour 2022 Copenhagen: The LEGO Group lays building bricks to scale Celonis

• Splunk and Celonis: 6 best practices for process mining and execution management success at scale

• Celosphere 2022: INGKA Group Pursues 'The Perfect Order'

• Skoda targets procurement process excellence with the help of gamification

• 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)

Automation opportunities abound

Celonis customers also have been looking for automation opportunities across processes via Celonis Execution Management System (EMS). The journey toward automation accelerated in 2022. 

• DSM focused on automation for its Order-to-Cash (O2C) processes. “We uncovered many of the manual process steps ripe for automation early on, with working capital improvement as one of the attractive benefits,” explained Marc Daams, DSM Celonis Lead. “Before working with Celonis, we could extract data but it was hard to comprehend and the team spent hours digging into each line item to try and identify the problems.” 

• Reckitt is embedding process mining and execution management throughout its organization and looking to automate operations. Vijay Purohit, IT Director of Corporate Functions & Automation at Reckitt, said: "We are looking at finding efficiencies within the landscape and trying to get to the digital first approach. Celonis and the other automation products we use are helping us to get there faster than before. So, this opens up a lot of doors for us, customers, go-to-market strategy and building up new products."

• Celonis World Tour 2022 Paris: Safran, Arkema highlight process excellence Arkema's Jean-Marc Viallatte, Vice President of the company's Supply Chain Group, said the company used Celonis to streamline order management processes and automate them. The primary goal was to standardize and automate order changes such as delivery date, price or quantity.

• Uniper process excellence in power plants yield safety, financial gains Speaking during the Celonis World Tour 2022 Munich keynote, Uniper Senior Vice President of Business Change Christian Floetotto said his company is integrating Celonis into its digital process transformation and automation initiatives. Uniper has realized value of more than 2 million euros in the field of plant maintenance, international energy trading and IT service management, said Floetotto.

• Deutsche Post DHL outlines Celonis EMS use cases for its HR processes Deutsche Post DHL outlined at Celonis World Tour 2022 Munich how it improved its hire-to-retire human resources processes and now plans to expand use of the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) and automation via the Action Engine. 

Simulation and process digital twins become priority

Process digital twins were a hot topic among customers. One customer had 15 deployed. Others were building process digital twins and noted that the addition of Celonis Process Sphere (a Celonis EMS capability built on object-centric process mining) will help scale the efforts. Credibom presented its digital twin and process simulation efforts.

Lufthansa Group’s Kayser said process intelligence has to operate at scale at a company that conducts 2,600 flights a day. The processes behind Lufthansa must adapt to everything from airspace capacity during conflicts, regulation, weather, airport infrastructure and safety.

Lufthansa is currently standardizing data ingestion and harmonizing it, creating digital twins of operations, and feeding a solution generator that can adapt to multiple scenarios for crew, aircraft, passengers, and dispatch.

iFood, Brazil's dominant delivery service, has racked up multiple wins with Celonis Execution Management System and Process Mining and plans to further scale by simulating processes, leveraging a data-driven culture and eliminating bottlenecks in its ecosystem. 

Systems transformation needs data integrity, visibility

Autodesk is typical of most large enterprises in that it has multiple ERP systems. Process mining is used to provide visibility throughout system migrations and to maintain data integrity. Autodesk saved about four to six weeks during its system migration and also caught 15 critical engineering defects in the connections between the old and new ERP systems. 

Jean-Marc Erieau, Director Process Mining & Execution Management MANN+HUMMEL Group also noted the importance of systems transformation at Celosphere 2022:

"We combined our S4/HANA transformation with Celonis. We are already cleaning up processes with Celonis and that applies to the SAP systems transformation. Celonis is giving us full transparency on what is happening globally. Celonis for us is part of our strategic picture for 2027."

Compliance can become a valued business partner

Global manufacturer Saint-Gobain put Celonis to work across the 120 internal audit missions it conducts each year. Celonis and Data Analytics have helped to reduce the length of each by up to two weeks, saving more than 4.5 years of time, and have transformed the perception of audit from ‘policeman to business partner’.

At Celonis World Tour 2022 New York, Nationwide and Wells Fargo outlined how they leveraged process mining and risk management to deliver value. Jason Burchwell, Vice President of Internal Audit at Nationwide, said process mining will become a key tool for auditors and risk management at the company. "What does the auditor of the future look like? It will be a digital auditor that views process mining as a key cornerstone," said Burchwell.

"We are marrying process mining with the risk management systems that have information with real operational events," said Jeremy Bastacky, Senior Lead Business Execution Consultant at Wells Fargo. "With process mining you can put together a picture to build the value proposition."

Use cases expand courtesy of co-innovation

Celonis customers are increasingly finding more process mining use cases and evolving to tackle front office issues too. These new use cases are emerging due to co-innovation between Celonis and its customers.  

For instance, ABB and Celonis have a long history of co-innovation. ABB, one of the first Celonis customers, has influenced the product roadmap. For its part, Celonis has helped ABB surface more value. 

Here’s a quick tour of some of the use cases that have emerged in 2022. 

• The Co-innovation Backstory: Emporix Commerce Execution Platform (CXP) Emporix, a commerce SaaS company, launched its Commerce Execution Platform (CXP) powered by Celonis at Celosphere 2022 and the effort highlights how Celonis Labs co-innovates with partners and customers. 

• Celonis expands startup ecosystem around Celonis EMS Celonis is seeing an acceleration in new startups being founded around highly specialized verticalized or horizontal Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products built on the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS). Startups to the roster already include Apolix, Czentric, DataLane, Ditro, Logatik, Marcadus, OFi, Osapien, Process&, ProcessGeek, ProcessLab, Process Owl, Simple, TRic and VisualFlow.

• Celosphere 2022: DHL improves warehouse performance with Celonis EMS DHL has deployed Celonis to improve its warehouse performance, quality and throughput in its logistics operations. 

• Celosphere 2022: Equans process improvements 30% reduction in throughput time Equans, a global utilities service management company that operates in 17 countries, reduced its service throughput time by 30% and processed 10,000 fewer service orders per month by improving its operational and contract management processes with Celonis.

• Celosphere 2022: Credibom notches value in overall process cycle time, rework Credibom, a consumer bank based in Portugal, is just starting its process mining journey, but has expansion plans after seeing early value realized.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief (former)

Larry Dignan is the former Editor in Chief of Celonis Media. Before joining Celonis, he was Editor in Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine.