In advance of this week’s Celosphere customer conference in Munich, two announcements from Celonis gave clear indication of the company’s ambitions to expand the functional scope of its platform and extend that platform into new use cases and industries.
The first announcement, issued today, is that Celonis has acquired Symbioworld, a provider of AI-driven business process management software that complements the company’s flagship process mining software.
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Late last week, the company detailed its work with the state of Oklahoma, which is the first US state to use its software to improve management of taxpayer funds. The state will use Celonis to enhance internal budget controls and spending reviews across agencies. This is a clear example of Celonis’ technology expanding beyond core use cases such as accounts payable, procurement, and inventory management.
Symbioworld Acquisition
Through its acquisition of Symbioworld (terms weren’t disclosed), Celonis will enable customers to design processes using a data-driven, system-agnostic approach that promises to eliminate the practice of designing processes in isolation then taking steps to streamline and automate them after the fact.
The combination of the two companies’ software means customers will be able to analyze how current processes run and thereby design ideal processes based on data. This will facilitate removal of unnecessary steps as well as automation of tasks for efficiency.
This could come into play in system transformations by enabling greater accuracy and precision in terms of process understanding, mitigating unforeseen risks and facilitating easier changes for business users.
The two companies also launched an enhanced version of their Process Cockpit, merging live process insights with data gathered by Symbio into one unified experience. This is intended to ensure compliant process execution across an organization by integrating core process KPIs with process models. Process Cockpit helps users to drive fully guided system and process transformation programs, while monitoring performance and adoption in real time.
A joint customer, KARL STORZ SE & Co KG, noted the synergies between the two companies’ products. “We are now able to redesign our processes based on the world’s best process insights,” said Etienne Kneschke, executive director, business process management at KARL STORZ. “Process intelligence is the foundational enabler of Generative AI-based automation in enterprises, as it feeds [large language models] with the essential contextual understanding they need, in order to know how the business runs across systems, departments, and regions.”
We’ll share more analysis of this acquisition as further details become available.
State Government Financial Use Case
Oklahoma has deployed process mining in its Office of Management and Enterprise Services to ensure stronger budgetary oversight. It did so after an April 2023 report found that state agency purchasing outside of central oversight exceeded $3 billion in fiscal 2022.
“Within one week of implementing Celonis, we have data-driven insights that help us understand our key financial challenges and how to address them,” said Joe McIntosh, chief information officer for the State of Oklahoma. “As a result, Celonis is core to our new Risk, Assessment and Compliance task force, and its always-on process assessment and improvement mechanism is now built into the way we work.”
The state plans to review other modules including those that support accounts payable, grants management, and IT service management.
