In this Celosphere 2023 interview, Acceleration Economy’s Tom Smith and Laura Gardner, director of global partnerships at Celonis, chat with Chris Knapik, process transformation senior director at PepsiCo while on location in Munich, Germany.
Highlights
Knapik oversees a team of about 40 people who are functional specialists or have backgrounds in Lean Six Sigma-type methodologies, and they are paired with technically oriented people. Knapik and his team are in the finance organization.
Celonis Use Cases (01:18)
The company started with “core” process mining use cases including procure to pay and accounts receivable. Four years later, it has expanded to trade promotions management, waste management, and more. Pepsico now has 50-60 use cases (a comparatively high number) but Knapik notes that there are “10 to 20” that people are using daily. Process mining is helping with SAP ERP system transformation (cloud migration) and enabling process optimization to occur earlier in that cycle; Celonis’ acquisition of Symbio should make that objective easier: “We’re actually presenting system data from the as-is landscape to inform the design” vs. before when “everybody’s pulling from testimony and memories.”
Making Automation More Intelligent (05:51)
More intelligent automation is one of the big promises of Celonis‘ newly announced Process Intelligence Graph, by way of ecosystem- and API-driven integrations with third-party tools such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools. “To see something like Process Intelligence Graph in the roadmap just speaks to APIs and things they’re going to have to allow those walls to break down even more, whether you’re doing automations with Celonis at a grander scale or you’re feeding somewhere else in the enterprise to inform those models and then AI and other things that are coming.”
Generative AI and Process Copilots (08:18)
GenAI needs to be approached pragmatically and thoughtfully to protect against risks. In a Celonis/process mining context, Process Copilots should deliver better insights and enable power users to become more “autonomous” — solving problems without having to enagage Knapik’s team or have that team’s resources become a bottleneck in terms of building a customization. That’s quicker time to value.
The company’s framework of value realization is to be conservative in evaluating expected gains —progressing through framing, measuring or tracking, then reporting as its lifecycle of value realization.
