This week, Celonis is demonstrating how Generative AI can enhance its core process mining technology by supporting natural language searches. That’s a technology combination that should further the goal of making its technology more accessible to non-technical business users.
The demos, taking place as part of the company’s 10-city World Tour that kicked off this week, are one of the product innovations that Celonis is highlighting to make process mining more widely available, not only to a wider range of business users but to third-party software vendors as well. Celonis is on the Acceleration Economy Top 10 shortlist of AI/Hyperautomation Enablers.
Collectively, the product initiatives build on the foundations of the company’s latest generation Object Centric Process Mining and its “Intelligence API.” The big innovation with Object Centric Process Mining is that it unlocks end-to-end views of an entire process, such as order to cash, by providing a single data model spanning the various elements that make up the process. With this visibility, business users gain a holistic view of their processes that enables problems to be pinpointed efficiently.
With its Generative AI demos, Celonis builds on years of history the company has with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), both of which have been offered in multiple ways including applications such as its Duplicate Checking, which is widely used by Celonis customers to identify duplicate invoices; in some cases, that app saves customers millions of dollars.
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“We are continuing to double down on how we think about enabling AI to be even more powerful and even more sophisticated, especially with all of the recent advancements that all of us have been watching with a lot of enthusiasm,” says Divya Krishnan, Celonis vice president of product marketing. “We’re uniquely positioned to provide the process intelligence — which I would define as the data that’s contextualized with process knowledge — and make it more intelligent and more powerful through use of machine learning.”
A new supply chain app, also rolled out this week, builds on the object-centric model to enable end-to-end visibility into lead times within this critical business function.
Generative AI Augments Process Mining
At its demos taking place this week, Celonis is showcasing — along with a software partner named Rollio that makes virtual AI assistants — the combination of Generative AI with process mining, creating the ability to use natural language requests for the first time to extract process mining insights. The capability involves parsing data and visualization requests from natural language questions.
The demo features a widely used process mining use case, namely, accounts payable. It shows how everyday business users can gather data measuring their rate of automation. It integrates large language models (LLMs) that are at the core of Generative AI with Celonis’ Process Query Language (PQL).
Krishnan said the demo highlights new functionality that can be brought to bear both for PQL experts as well as business users with no knowledge of the underlying technology who can tap into it through an easy-to-use interface.
The Generative AI demo doesn’t represent a finished product but, rather, an opportunity to gain customer feedback for the Celonis product teams. “I think there has been a big rush in the market to put out a range of different AI solutions, but we have a vested interest and want to make sure that what we’re putting out is validated and seen as a clear value add for customers.”
The demo also serves as a tangible example of how Celonis aims to work with third-party software providers, through its Intelligence API, to further propagate process mining technology.
“The hope and the intent is very much for us to say, ‘How could we make our process intelligence available to an ecosystem, who can then take it and bring that intelligence to bear in the form of enhancing their own applications, enabling AI and large language models, and then orchestrating automation,” Krishnan says.
The Intelligence API is now generally available.
Better Lead Time Visibility, Healthier Supply Chains
A new application unveiled today is the End-to-End Lead Times App, which is intended to help customers work through major supply chain challenges around inventory and lead times that first surfaced during Covid.
The company said the new software will:
- Track the movement and location of each component through each process required to build finished goods
- Identify potential root causes for bottlenecks, such as outdated master data, and excess inventory
One Celonis customer expects immediate financial impact from the new software. Freudenberg Sealing Technologies predicts it will reduce working capital across production sites by about 10 percent with the app, says Kai Fuhrer, director, global supply chain controlling for the company, based in Weinheim, Germany. “With this end-to-end transparency, we can find ways to deliver the same service in an even shorter time frame and act faster and be more flexible even when disruptions occur,” he says, adding, “I’ve worked in supply chain for over 20 years. This level of transparency has never been possible.”
Discussions with customers indicate that supply chain issues remain a stumbling block, more than three years after the onset of Covid. “Supplier lead times remain a massive blind spot and excess inventory is a major problem,” Krishnan says, “and there’s a general struggle with really understanding how to operate with the variability of the processes.”
Business Miner for Non-Techies
The company also said that Business Miner, a tool optimized for non-technical business users first announced at Celosphere last November, is now generally available.
It includes process-specific explorations that a business user can take on, including Accounts Payable and Receivable, Procurement, and Order Management. It also includes process-agnostic explorations intended to monitor indicators such as throughput time or whether deadlines are being met. Krishnan said this latter category could be applied in a financial services business to analyze customer onboarding or loan origination processes.
Business Miner was an early initiative by the company to democratize process mining insights and execution management technology.
The company also introduced the Multi-Object Process Explorer, which brings Object Centric Process Mining to existing Celonis capabilities. This will enable users to easily switch from object to object when conducting explorations, quickly assess relationships between objects and events, and supplement their analyses with visualizations spanning objects.
Closing Thoughts
With demos of Generative AI augmenting process mining, Celonis is taking tangible steps to embrace a technology that has seized the imagination of the tech industry faster than any in recent memory. The Generative AI work is another important step toward extending the reach of process mining technology, which has been mostly in the domain of technical and scientific users, and ensuring that its benefits can be delivered on an organization-wide basis. Business challenges aren’t the sole domain of techies, so the technology that’s built to solve them shouldn’t be either.
With its End-to-End Lead Times App, Celonis is addressing one of the larger business process challenges that any of us have seen in years, and providing much-needed visibility that should be an important first step toward moving beyond inventory and lead time issues. With both democratization and supply chain efforts, Celonis is taking on core business functions in which customers are likely willing (and able) to invest today, despite the ongoing cost pressures they face.
More Celonis and Supply Chain Insights:
- How Celonis Process Mining Innovations Drive Value in Supply Chains, Digital Twins
- Celonis Software Delivers Enterprise Savings That Impress Even CEOs
- Celonis Co-CEO Alex Rinke Talks Customers’ Macro View, Supply Chains, and Sustainability
- 5 Ways To Improve Today’s Supply Chain Mess
- How Celonis’ Latest Tech Makes Supply Chains Run Better
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