Celonis today announced the acquisition of Process Analytics Factory GmbH (PAF), a company that specializes in providing insights into the mining process within the Microsoft Power Platform. The deal will bring the capabilities of Celonis ’deep mining process to the millions of Microsoft users, where they work, and follow the broader trend of embedding Celonis itself within popular enterprises platform ecosystem.
Celonis has long had a solid background in the SAP ecosystem, but has since also announced a strategic partnership with workflow vendor ServiceNow. ServiceNow also made a financial investment in Celonis.
Speaking at diginomica this week, Bastian Nominacher, Co-Founder and CEO of Celonis, said:
What we do at Celonis really helps companies make sense of their data, allowing them to reveal and fix inefficiencies they haven’t seen before. It can be used for any type of business process if you want to understand what is happening, to also get recommendations and take an active part for improvement.
We acquired PAF, which is a highly regarded process mining company that really specializes in providing process insights on the Microsoft Power platform. We acquired them as part of our strategy to enable companies everywhere, in all industries, to access and utilize the Celonis mining and implementation management process. And it’s important to bring that information to where people actually work.
The PAF mining process product is fully integrated with Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft 365, which it says is available for analysis, visualization and optimization of almost any process. Celonis ’Execution Management System (EMS) combines real-time data and process intelligence to help organizations understand their pain points in the process and take targeted action.
PAF will be fully integrated with Celonis EMS, Nominacher said, and will allow users to take advantage of mining process technology within their Microsoft environments. The nominacher said:
Thousands of companies have already obtained this information from Celonis EMS. But there are thousands more that work within the Microsoft platform, specifically the Power platform. There are more than 10 million business users who use it every day, 79% of the Fortune 500, more than 260,000 companies worldwide. So we want to put Celonis there, where the job is done.
This is really part of our approach to democracy of access to Celonis and to technology. This is part of our execution management everywhere strategy, of which our partnership with ServiceNow is also part of it, to bring us closer to the ServiceNow ecosystem.
Nominacher said part of the driving force behind the acquisition is also bringing the PAF team and its expertise to the Celonis fold.
Given ServiceNow’s recent partnership, and now commitment to the Microsoft ecosystem, diginomica asked Nominacher if Celonis intends to expand its presence on additional enterprise platforms through similar means. He said:
We are constantly evaluating the market, but it is really driven by customer demand. Traditionally we came from the SAP ecosystem, we have a strong side of ServiceNow, and now Microsoft – so we have very good coverage.
But we keep checking. And not only do we do it from a tech partnership perspective, we also have partnerships with Accenture, IBM, and with global GSI, which helps us penetrate more platforms and ecosystems, as well as industry verticals.
Understanding the use case
Nominacher said Celonis ’process mining platform is“ relevant for all industries and processes ”, but companies typically choose an area where they have a particular pain point in the process, develop a small team, and then quickly deploy from there.
Ambition – or the targeted outcome – is often cost savings, as well as improving both employee and customer satisfaction, by fixing bad processes. In addition, other use cases typically include compliance and maintenance, as a lot of waste is generated by poor or inefficient processes.
Several high -profile companies have indicated the key role Celonis plays in their cost -saving and/or innovation agendas. For example, Deutsche Bank recently said it had used Celonis to help deliver more than EUR 60 million in cost savings, from just improving the efficiency of 40 processes.
In the same way, Siemens said it is using Celonis to help target savings of EUR 270 million in 2021 and BP said the vendor’s mining process capabilities play a key role in helping it. to determine $ 2.5 billion in cost savings.
In the acquisition, Nominacher explains how Microsoft users can deepen their use of PAF with Celonis. He said:
Imagine that you are an automotive manufacturer and you are faced with challenges in your supply chain, which in the current macro environment is a common challenge of our customers.
Obviously you can go to Celonis EMS and see everything happening – let’s say your delivery reliability has declined from 90% to 60%, you can route the drill down why. But you can also see it directly within your Power BI dashboard. Just before you see this observation and you have to do your own digging.
Now with the Celonis Experience, you can, directly outside of this KPI, dive deep into Celonis and see where the issues are and then directly trigger action.
You can now have auto-orchestration, for example, using Microsoft Teams and track it daily. So it’s an end-to-end insight into all of your transactional and knowledge worker systems to, ultimately, maximize execution capacity. It can also trigger a ServiceNow workflow, or other components, obviously.
What I take
Celonis caught my attention during the ServiceNow partnership. It is very rare for ServiceNow to make financial investments in companies – usually favoring the development of the home country. It suggested to me that Celonis might be one to watch in the coming months.
When I asked Nominacher what success looks like for Celonis, he said that one of his top priorities is to get the strong customer story into the public domain. That’s music to our hearing – and public reference points from some of the world’s largest organizations suggest it’s okay. We look forward to talking to some of those customers and recording those stories.
I’ve long said that too much of companies ’digital transformation efforts are focused solely on the front-end engagement layer, while ignoring the broken processes that continue to persist in the back-end. There is no point in having a fancy digital tool if it still requires manual manipulation and ad-hoc tweaks to multiple behind-the-scenes systems.
The next wave of digital transformation will focus exactly on that problem – dive deeper into the process, while applying automation tools to action fixes. Celonis is well positioned to help companies solve exactly that problem.
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