In this News Desk interview during Celonis’ Celosphere 2022 conference in Munich, Tom Smith speaks with Accenture’s Paul Prendergast, Europe CFO and Enterprise Value Lead, and Artur Siurdyban, Process Mining Capability Lead, Europe. The three discuss the Accenture-Celonis partnership, apps that Accenture has developed for Celonis, and customers’ outlook going into the next year.
Highlights
01:25 — Paul notes that Accenture has been working with Celonis on a strategic level for the last 12 months, focusing on three areas:
- Strategic investment of assets and building apps that are available in the Celonis app store “to address business problems at scale.”
- Specific client projects, where they may have a need for process improvements or increased resilience. These types of projects can drive millions of dollars of value, be it in finance or supply chain.
- Co-investment in leveraging Celonis in Accenture’s own internal applications and use cases.
02:21 — Artur says Accenture developed a supply chain resilience app as part of a hackathon organized by Celonis. The supply-chain app was named the best in its category; it’s designed to solve pressing supply chain problems that arose after Covid broke supply chains. There are also conflicts across the world that also put a strain on supply chains. Additionally, there’s global warming and climate change that causes fires, floods, and more. All of these factors impact supply chains in terms of shipments, distribution hubs, and supplier locations. Accenture found a “perfect combination” of its intellectual property and functional expertise in the supply chain area and the Celonis technology.
03:50 — Celonis can provide a digital twin of an entire supply chain. It knows where shipments, suppliers, and distribution hubs are so it can help you assess the risk to supply chains. Users of the Accenture-developed app can get an early warning if a supplier that accounts for a vast majority of their key raw material is in an affected area, they can learn about that quickly so they can have time to react and have time to take preventive measures. Because the technology knows where shipments are, it can reroute shipments based on integration with map algorithms in an automated way so that they avoid areas of high supply chain risk and make sure customers get their products on time and in full. This app is already live on the Celonis marketplace. So it’s free for anyone to go in, check out what it can do.
07:25 — Paul discusses new Celonis products introduced at the event, including Process Sphere and Business Miner. “We can see accelerated application of that because then you can start to bring together different instances, different scenarios, and start to pivot that breaking down the functional silos and looking at that end to end. And that’s a real opportunity to turn it on its head. Because as we look at transformation programs, they often fall down on the functional silos as you try to break from finance into procurement, or supply chain. I think the other area is making it more approachable and usable by the business community.”
09:42 — Looking ahead, Paul notes the uncertain times we’re living in and the likelihood of another crisis around the corner. “I think the beauty of what we see now with the product suite from Celonis is the ability to say ‘I can scale up a broader audience with this,’ bringing more datasets and start to model that accordingly.” There could be new areas that utilize this functionality if you look at banking and some of the industrial areas. The other key thing that’s taking place is organizations investing to set up Centers of Excellence to embed that end-to-end in operational excellence and not just in terms of process improvement, but control and compliance, which is a really hot area.
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