Celonis wants to help organizations smooth out the process of their digital transformation, and the Berlin-based business offers tech solutions to help their clients achieve that goal. Founded by Martin Klenk, Bastian Nominacher, and Alexander Rinke in 2011, the tech firm offers ‘enterprise performance acceleration software’ designed to help companies identify areas of operational friction.
“Celonis would tell you 'Here are the bottlenecks, and here's where you're too slow, and here's where you can speed up.' And we are increasingly expanding on that and building the action to improve the results [in] the Celonis products so that it doesn’t stop at the insight – it also gives you the action to improve things right away,” said Alexander Rinke, co-CEO of Celonis. "Then it becomes this thing that you put on top of a process, and …two months later it runs 30-40% more efficiently."
Trusted by the likes of Siemens, Uber, Citi, Airbus, and Vodafone – they have transformed what was once a time-consuming, costly process usually conducted by outside consultants into a fluid “discover-enhance-monitor” approach that provides actionable insights to its clients. Organizations can integrate Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud (IBC) with their ERP and CRM to receive real-time reports on internal operations. Users can identify problem areas and uncover root causes so that improvements in processes can be made. In addition, IBC uses AI-driven technology to crunch the data and generate actionable intel so clients can achieve their chosen outcomes.
Process mining software is a newer market segment and its targeted towards organizations that want to improve efficiency in complex business systems and automate their operations, when possible. “Celonis is the clear market leader in a category with open-ended potential. It has demonstrated an enviable record of growth and value creation for its customers and partners,” said Feroz Dewan, CEO of Arena Holdings and lead investor in Celonis’s latest funding round.
Up to this point, however, process mining only captured data from a company's enterprise systems, but most processes involve events that occur outside of these infrastructures. This, Alexander Rinke said, was a gap that needed to be filled and Celonis responded by adding new tech – called a Task Mining Engine – to its AI process mining engine.
“So far, [Celonis process mining] focused on the business data in the company – the orders, invoices, shipments which start in the business systems like CRM or ERP,” Rinke explained. “However, we missed anything that was happening outside of the systems, such as somebody leaving the ERP to open up an Excel file or to send an email. The new Task Mining Engine adds those pieces to the puzzle, and it can identify everything that happens on people’s workstations outside of the business systems.”
Task mining is one example of the increasing use of artificial intelligence technology within process automation. It is serving an emerging interest from organizations looking for more information on how tasks fit into their broader processes. As program vice president of IDC's business process management and middleware management area, Maureen Fleming examines products and processes that are deployed within an enterprise ecosystem. She believes that Celonis offers something “relatively unique” in an area that is becoming disruptive to business practices.
“Celonis looks at process mining and task mining as one piece of what they offer for automation planning, and then they also tie that to predictive analytics to help understand what a process is about or whether a task could be automated using AI," Fleming said. “[Celonis has] a significant vision in how to build out these high-level uses of AI in IT within processes."
“Our tech has become its own category with a lot of successful customers,” Nominacher said in an interview. “It’s a key driver for sustainable business.”
