In this Celosphere 2023 Interview, Acceleration Economy’s Tom Smith and Alex Rinke, co-founder and co-CEO, Celonis, chat about the company’s commitment to customer value and collaboration within the ecosystem.
Highlights
Rinke explains how Celonis is focused on empowering customers with new technologies, a commitment evident in the large number of Celosphere attendees, Allianz’ customer experience, the creation of the Process Intelligence Graph, and Celonis’ acquisition of Symbio.
Process Intelligence and Customer Value in the Insurance Industry (02:03)
The CEO of Allianz, Oliver Bäte, a Celosphere speaker, made interesting points about how process mining is helping its business. He wasn’t talking about it in the context of accounts receivable or procurement, but instead in terms of customer processes. Tom was struck by how focused Allianz is on customers and how process mining can enable it to serve them better.
Allianz, a massive insurer and a longtime Celonis customer, has been going up against digital insurance companies seeking to disrupt the industry. It has put the customer at the heart of its transformation. Rinke says he has seen Allianz go from smaller technical process mining deployments to making its program bigger and putting customers at the center. It wants to create amazing experiences at the best prices.
The Allianz CEO pointed out that with many software companies, the customer buys a license from them and it’s up to the customer to derive value. Whereas Celonis focuses on helping the customers realize the value. Celonis helps measure value for every one of its customers and make it trackable with its Transformation Hub.
Benefits of the Process Intelligence Graph (06:11)
The Process Intelligence Graph, a new Celonis product, has three benefits for the customer. First, is time to value. With the Process Intelligence Graph, there’s a data model and a knowledge layer that is independent of systems that it interacts with. Customers don’t have to build many different data structures.
The second benefit is that it opens up entirely new use case possibilities. Rinke uses the example of how the “graph” helped BMW see the purchasing process from a new perspective.
The third benefit is that the Process Intelligence Graph enables other technologies (such as robotics process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI). It also optimizes investments in cloud ERP systems transformations.
Bigger Role than Ever for the Ecosystem (10:07)
There’s a bigger role than ever for the ecosystem partners, whether they’re implementing software, developing custom applications, or bringing industry expertise to the end customer. They’re more important than ever, and Celonis is excited to be open and collaborative. For example, Celonis is collaborating with project44 which provides supply chain traceability.
There was an ecosystem partners sumnmt at Celosphere. Rinke notes that through partners, Celonis can learn more about specific industries such as retail, financial services, and consumer packaged goods (CPG). There are 40,000 people now certified on Celonis, and they’re ready to go and help customers.
Process Intelligence and Acquisition of Symbio (12:06)
Another big announcement was Celonis’ acquisition of Symbio. Celonis and Symbio had worked together on joint accounts for several years. They decided to work on building a product together, a management cockpit for business processes. While doing so, they said, “Hey, why don’t we just join forces?”
The idea behind Symbio is to design a process in an optimized way from the outset. For systems transformation, it’s great. Symbio has done a great job on the technology and it has a very clean modern architecture, which is tightly integrated with Microsoft.
