In this Celosphere 2023 interview, Acceleration Economy’s Tom Smith and Faika Halici, senior director of customer advocacy at Celonis, chat with Raaj Joshi, director, controls and compliance transformation at Astra Zeneca, while on location in Munich, Germany.
Highlights
Astra Zeneca is a pharmaceutical company headquartered in the UK with revenues around $45 billion. It operates primarily across biopharmaceuticals, oncology, and rare diseases. Its Celonis use cases include “internal controls.”
Celonis Use Cases, Including Regulatory Factors (00:58)
Internal controls exist to protect against poor or problematic financial practices but also to give confidence to shareholders that all the numbers being reported are above the board. Joshi labels controls as a “very underrated” use case for process mining; because process mining lets companies shine a light on their processes using rules, thresholds, and algorithms, it “falls perfectly” into the role of controls and compliance. A lot of financial work takes a long time to prep but Celonis helps to reduce that manual burden, sometimes even cutting up to 10 days out of the equation. Sarbanes-Oxley is a big regulatory consideration. Astra Zeneca relies on Celonis to ensure the numbers being reported are trustworthy.
New Celonis Products (03:56)
Joshi says he’s “really excited” about the new Celonis copilot technology and the use of the AI engine at the heart of the new Process Intelligence Graph. The company is piloting AI to augment several controls in the background. Transformation Hub (dashboards) will be helpful in presenting data to the C-suite, Joshi says, and helps deal with the volume of available data. “Presenting it in the right way, in the most meaningful way that people can actually take away something from it, I think is massive and really, really critical.”
2024 Outlook
Controls and compliance is a juggernaut that’s going to continue because there are loads more controls that Astra Zeneca is looking to manage through Celonis. But it’s also looking at various processes that often are managed through Celonis. (Common examples include procure to pay, order to cash, inventory management, and more). They’re also looking to simplify the controls process through the use of AI and generative AI. Joshi expects that to kick off in Q1 of 2024. He closes with his view that process mining for controls and compliance is an “absolute game changer.”
