Celonis and ServiceNow have announced a strategic partnership. The main goal is to help ordinary customers carry out digital transformation. To this end, the platforms of the two providers will be more closely integrated with each other: ServiceNow’s workflow platform and Celonis’ Executive Management System (EMS).
Celonis co-founder and co-CEO Bastian Nominacher (Bastian Nominacher) said that the speed of digital transformation of many companies has been accelerating recently. At the same time, the amount of data the company generates every day has indeed exploded. For the person in charge, it is now mainly to make these data available and create added value for their own business.
But this is the most important thing for many companies, added Detlev Krause, Vice President of ServiceNow Europe, Middle East and Africa Center and General Manager of Germany. The data landscape is usually heterogeneous and fragmented. A lot of data is in silos that are difficult to crack. Therefore, the digitization project will be postponed. According to Klaus, four out of five projects are behind their schedules and expectations.
Photo: ServiceNow
This is where the partnership between Celonis and ServiceNow comes in. Celonis has an advantage in process mining, that is, collecting and evaluating data to optimize processes. Recently, the Munich-based company has become increasingly focused on using its EMS to initiate direct analytics-based actions to optimize and automate processes. This is where ServiceNow launched the Now platform. Users can identify bottlenecks and interruptions in the process, and set up new workflows accordingly to correct these problems. To this end, ServiceNow uses a configuration management database (CMDB) integrated in the platform. However, Klaus admitted that sometimes it is not easy to provide the required data to this CMDB at the necessary speed. This shortcoming can be compensated by closer integration with Celonis.
Krause and Nominacher refer to many common customers who will promote better integration of the two platforms. According to the two managers, in order to better understand their needs, they had many discussions with the user company in advance. Krause believes that the most important thing for customers is to speed up, reduce complexity and better realize the added value of the project. “Celonis and ServiceNow are leaders in their respective fields, and we are very excited about the opportunities they have jointly opened up for business processes,” said Matthias Egelhaaf, head of digital solutions for GBS at Siemens.
It is not yet clear how the connection between Celonis and ServiceNow will be technically. For example, it is not clear whether and to what extent data from the Munich company’s EMS should flow directly into the ServiceNow platform. The two sides emphasized that cooperation has just begun. As part of the development partnership, our goal is also to create solutions together. Nominacher uses machine learning as an example to better predict the impact of certain measures on processes and workflows. Both suppliers hope to show results in the coming year.
Photo: Celonis
ServiceNow and Celonis also agreed to establish a strategic listing relationship. They also hope to cooperate more closely in marketing and sales. ServiceNow also announced that it will hold a financial stake in Celonis. Klaus said that the investment is still being discussed. However, the ServiceNow manager does not want to see this participation as a sign of a possible acquisition of Celonis. At the same time, Nominacher, the co-CEO of Celonis, emphasized that his company wants to remain independent in the long term. The cooperation with ServiceNow is more a manifestation of a stronger partner orientation.
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In fact, the day before the announcement of the collaboration with Alexander Rinke, the CEO colleague of ServiceNow Nominacher, it was announced during the 2021 World Tour that Celonis wanted to build its own platform, including an ecosystem. Partners with their own solutions should be able to connect and use data from Celonis systems to implement process optimization in user companies. Rinke explained that this is about using partner expertise. There are currently more than 100 applications available on the platform. Partners include well-known companies such as Accenture and KPMG.
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Examples from Connexiom and ExxonMobil show how this works. Connexiom is an expert in the automation of sales orders, that is, the efficient processing of received orders. ExxonMobil’s Digital Transformation Officer Corey Alemand reported on the World Tour how difficult it is to plan new businesses based on the cumbersome traditional ERP system. However, with the help of Connexiom and Celonis dashboards, a highly automated incoming order can be established within 80 days. Today, approximately 72,000 orders have been run through the system each year.
This also shows that classic trading systems such as ERP are increasingly decoupled from digital workflow optimization. Rinke talked about the digital layer on top of applications such as SAP and Oracle. This is where the manager locates companies such as Celonis and ServiceNow. Their solution uses data from these trading systems, but according to Rinke, the actual transformative function can be found in the digital layer above.
The co-CEO mentioned the various possibilities of automating processes with the Celonis platform. There are now connectors to more than 900 systems. In the SAP environment alone, there are more than 60 automation scenarios available to users. Rinke reports users who have taken months to develop similar functions using standard SAP tools. That of course can be understood as the peak against opponents. SAP is currently working to advance the subject of business process intelligence (BPI). To this end, the Waldorf-based company took over Signavio, a process mining expert, at the beginning of the year.
Rinke called for the adoption of a new analytical paradigm. The data should work for the user company and help automate decision making. Current tools cannot do this. “A new kind of software is needed,” the Celonis co-founder hypothesized. Traditional analysis is like a fishing rod, and users throw it into massive amounts of data, hoping to gain important insights from it. Look at the problem from the manager’s point of view: “The ocean is getting bigger and bigger.”
Photo: Celonis
With its Executive Management System (EMS), Celonis hopes to build a bridge between data and actions that can be derived directly from these results through intelligent assessment. According to Rinke, EMS provides more than 10,000 APIs in more than 1,000 different systems. In addition, new features are constantly being added. For example, “process simulation” should be available in November 2021. This enables users to predict the consequences of process changes, for example in terms of production time or cost.
In order to better handle streaming data, Celonis took over the startup company Lenses. Its technology is based on Apache Kafka and aims to make it easier for users to enter data into the Celonis platform in real time. Lenses also provides corresponding connectors for various data sources. In addition, users should be able to run analysis across various processes through “multi-event logs.” For example, problems in the supply chain can be identified and resolved more quickly. Rinke said that in the end, the reason can be found in many processes, such as logistics, warehousing, and production. In order to allow customers to better understand the interrelationships and dependencies of processes, Celonis will also provide “execution diagrams” in the future. This should make it possible to visualize the corresponding links.
Celonis management is again ambitious on its world tour. Rinke said that today, only a small part of the data is used. If you successfully change this, it will not only change the company, but also the whole world. This also seems to be profitable. Celonis quoted Gartner as saying that by 2025, the software market supporting hyper-automation will reach nearly $860 billion.
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