ServiceNow collaborates with the new Celonis to study the process in depth

ServiceNow and Celonis today announced a strategic partnership to help organizations make the most of their systems of record, enabling them to isolate process bottlenecks and automate workflows. ServiceNow also stated that it intends to make a financial investment in Celonis, a company specializing in deep processing and mining.

This partnership can be very interesting. ServiceNow has long positioned itself as a “platform within a platform,” and it seeks to bridge the gap between existing systems of record and help the workflow within the organization. With the cooperation with Celonis, ServiceNow seems to go further. For example, integration with Celonis’ process mining capabilities will allow the Now platform to penetrate the company’s ERP or CRM system more deeply.

Both companies intend to cross-sell their products, have common listing capabilities, and stated that they intend to jointly develop new solutions to help customers “identify and prioritize processes suitable for automation, and then create digital workflows to optimize These processes are “processes”. These jointly developed solutions will be launched on the market in the first half of 2022.

By the way, it was a busy week for Celonis. It also announced the acquisition of Lens.io, a leader in the fast-growing streaming data industry; the launch of Celonis Execution Graph, which provides intelligence across business processes; and it also Plan to establish a strategic partnership with Conexiom, a leader in the field of sales order automation.

We spoke with ServiceNow Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright and Celonis Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and co-owner Miguel Milano to discuss why customers and buyers should be interested in the new partnership.

The key is to gain a deeper understanding of your organization’s processes, no matter what system of record you are dealing with, and then use that data to automate the most important work processes. Wright explained:

“What we want to do is to see how we deal with process mining the world to redefine how we get more information from these workflows.

We now have many companies that are making large investments in digital transformation, but they are not really realizing all the value. What we want to do is to work with Celonis to view your entire business process, no matter what system it flows through, because we will be able to allow you to apply changes to transform and start to understand the bottlenecks in the process-make sure you can do it with them what.

For us, the biggest benefit is that we can work with Celonis across multiple systems of record to isolate the bottlenecks in the process, and then we can use ServiceNow technology to start automation and eliminate some of these bottlenecks.

Wright said that this cooperation is directly related to ServiceNow’s strategic focus on “hyper-automation”, which is beginning to connect enterprise tools together and let them work in a more cohesive manner. He added:

It allows us to now handle workflows outside of the ServiceNow world, whether across CRM systems, ERP systems, or other systems of record, to recognize the entire process.

Milano of Celonis CRO agrees and emphasizes that the ultimate goal is for the company to truly get a return on their digital investment. He said:

For the first time, customers will be able to bridge the gap between the two: how to use their own data, turn the data into insights, and then turn these insights into actions.

By combining market-leading process mining technology with a market-leading workflow automation platform, we can accelerate the digital transformation efforts of our customers. By the way, most of them have invested millions or dozens in the past few years Billion, and only a small percentage of people have got the correct return on investment.

What is the use case?

ServiceNow and Celonis stated that their customer bases already have a large overlap, even if customers are not always aware that they are already using these two tools. The partnership aims to focus on the complementary advantages of combining process mining and workflow automation.

Wright highlighted some examples where customers have achieved this goal. He pointed out that a car manufacturer was processing the received warranty claims, but found that the process of completing these claims was very long. Wright explained:

They can dig through the whole process. What they actually did was they finally came up with a concept they called a “warranty center” in order to be able to streamline the process by providing a workflow based on their excavations.

Another example is a consumer product company that uses Celonis to identify inefficiencies in warehouse management. Wright added:

When they manage the warehouse, they look at what went wrong from an operational perspective. They found that 30% of orders were delayed. So what they did was ask about 200 employees to find out the cause of these last-minute problems.

Then what they can do is understand where the process is interrupted and start to study how they can use Celonis to mine that information and ServiceNow to provide automation to get it through these different stages.

My point of view

Strategic partnerships are often too numerous to list, but ServiceNow’s financial investment in Celonis shows how much benefit the two companies intend to reap. When the jointly delivered solution starts to be delivered in the first half of next year, we can expect to see very tight integration between the two systems and industry solutions that identify common use cases.

It is also important to note that if this partnership wins the favor of buyers, it has the potential to create a new level of “stickiness” between ServiceNow as a platform and the organization’s system of record. Obtaining a return on investment in certain systems of record, especially ERP, may require time and continuous work. If the NOW platform is combined with Celonis, it can not only help deal with these assets, but also solve process bottlenecks, and at the same time automate the work of the entire enterprise-well, this may be an attractive proposal.