In this Celosphere 2023 interview, Acceleration Economy’s Tom Smith and Faika Halici, senior director of customer advocacy at Celonis, chat with Etienne Kneschke, executive director, business process management at Karl Storz, while on location in Munich, Germany.
Highlights
Karl Storz is a Germany-based medical engineering products firm specializing in endoscopy. Kneschke’s responsibilities include business process management, consulting services, governance, and performance monitoring.
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Celonis’s Acquisition of Symbio (02:28)
Karl Storz used both Celonis and Symbio tools prior to Celonis’ acquisition of the latter. The tools have been used with processes that directly affect products and customers. Symbio provides a holistic view of HR, operations, logistics, sales, marketing, and product development. Celonis is used to evaluate operations processes including accounts payable and accounts receivable to make such processes are transparent and drive digital transformation. With Celonis, Karl Storz reconstructs processes based on digital footprints but there are a lot of manual processes and the company is looking for process improvements.
“Of course, we want to have all this information and all this operational data in one process model for the whole company so the whole company starts to talk the same language when it comes to processes,” Kneschke says. Linking the two systems together will be a big priority for 2024.
Managing Processes Like Products (06:10)
“Our philosophy is we need to manage processes like we manage products or services,” Kneschke says. “We need process managers who manage the process along the lifecycle.” There are automation use cases because the company’s work has revealed a lot of repetitive activities where it sees big potential for optimization so employees can place greater focus on value-added activities. It also hopes to gain speed and, with that, competitive advantage. “The faster you can deliver the product to the customer, the better.” Another use case is analyzing lead times or cycle times and identifying where there are bottlenecks.
Process Intelligence Graph, Process Co-Pilots (10:06)
When the company first started working with Celonis, data volume was overwhelming. Now Kneschke says it’s possible to ask businesspeople: what is the view you want to take of processes? That’s possible with objects and it makes it easier to get employees on board. Kneschke says he’d like to have generative AI “immediately” because this will accelerate process optimization to provide transparency; the copilot will help do that.
