Business process management systems (BPMS) create logs of process instances, and these logs provide raw material for fruitful analysis. Celonis has applied machine learning and AI technologies to predict process performance in the future, amongst other things. This trend of applying AI and machine learning to business data analysis will accelerate over the coming years, and Celonis’ Proactive Insights Engine (Pi) is likely to be the first of many in this field. The full press release is below:
Celonis has launched the industry’s first enterprise-class, big data analytics process mining platform fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The Celonis Proactive Insights Engine (Pi) acts as an automated advisor that gives full, unbiased visibility into all business processes and uncovers hidden inefficiencies while providing prescriptive recommendations on how to fix them in real time.
More than 200 customers, including Fortune 1000 leaders Siemens, Bayer, SAP, Dow Chemical, Vodafone and Nestle, already use Celonis process mining technology to improve margins, business agility and customer service while reducing operational costs by as much as 30 percent. These customers now have complete transparency and a greater understanding of their existing operations, enabling them to truly capitalize on the promise of the digital business transformation.
To date, Celonis customers have saved hundreds of millions of dollars by improving key processes such as purchase-to-pay, orders-to-cash, production, logistics, accounts payable, accounts receivable and IT service management. The introduction of Celonis Pi, with the addition of machine learning and AI, further strengthens the Celonis solution portfolio by fully automating the discovery and analysis of operational processes and offering prescriptive recommendations to improve efficiency immediately.
“In the past, organizations hired management consultants or used traditional analytics tools to optimize IT-driven processes, but now they have a better way to drive business optimization,” said Celonis Co-Founder and Co-CEO Alexander Rinke. “Our automated analytics uncover insights that used to take several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars for consultants to uncover. And unlike traditional analytics, we explain why processes are broken and how to fix them. We give corporate data a full body scan and unbiased analysis to solve the problems customers did not even know they should be looking for, while traditional tools merely address the questions fed to them.”
The new Celonis Pi Engine is designed to transform organizations into value-driven enterprises, helping them focus on business outcomes rather than data for the sake of data. It comprises four core components:
- Pi Conformance – Compares actual operations to the ways that processes were designed to occur (conformance checking) and automatically identifies the highest priority issues and their root causes so users can take immediate action.
- Pi Social – Provides a deep understanding of the human aspect of processes and identifies which teams have the best outcomes as well as which interactions result in lost time or bottlenecks. It also discovers where inefficiencies in an organization’s structure calls for improvement.
- Pi Companion – Identifies potential issues before they even happen and allows users to make the right decisions during process execution rather than after a problem arises.
- Pi Machine Learning – Makes predictions about an organization’s future so that processes can be adjusted to meet key business KPIs by using historical data. Understands that a process that works today cannot remain static forever.
Many existing customers are eager to adopt the AI and machine learning capabilities found in Celonis Pi including Siemens AG which currently uses Celonis to analyze 30 processes for over 70 ERP systems, thus running the world’s largest process mining installation. Currently, there are over 4,000 registered Siemens users that are analyzing processes across all business units and regions.
Anne Moxie, senior analyst of the data and analytics program at the leading technology market research firm Nucleus Research concurs. “Celonis leverages big data mining to uncover complex processes that allow users to have visibility into the daily activities and workflows of their organizations. Enterprise customers are demanding greater operational transparency so they can adapt processes to take advantage of new opportunities or to improve the efficiency of their organizations. We have found that advanced analytics drives 2.2 times more ROI than traditional BI, however they don’t always have the time or resources to do a deep dive into their operations. By automating operational excellence, they eliminate a huge distraction and identify opportunities to drive future growth.”
Celonis Pi is the first solution launched by Celonis in the U.S. since it raised $27.5 million in Series A funding from Accel and 83North in June 2016 to help further North American expansion. Already profitable and renowned as one of the fastest growing technology companies in Europe, Celonis recently won the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2016 Award in the Startup category in Germany.