Upskilling, strategic partnership central to our growth strategy: Celonis

Celonis, founded over a decade ago, develops process mining tools, which businesses use to discover inefficiencies in their operations that the human eye may not spot. For example, the technology can flag that a firm is double-paying an invoice due to a slight difference in spelling. The German-based firm, with a $13 billion valuation forayed into the India market in late 2021, and is optimistic about the company’s growth prospects here. In an exclusive interaction with TechCircle.com, Anitha Scaria George, Celonis India center of excellence (CoE) and Country Leader, speaks about the opportunities of process mining for its customers, global system integrators (SIs), business process outsourcing (BPO) providers, consultants, and academia, besides shedding light on the importance of upskilling and strategic partnerships for the company’s growth and development. Edited excerpts:

Can you explain what process mining is vis-à-vis its functions in a company’s day-to-day-operations? 

Process mining is a set of techniques for the analysis of operational processes based on event logs extracted from a company's databases, information systems, or business management software such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, electronic health records, and so on. As a concept, it is not completely new. In the late 1990s, Professor Wil van der Aalst coined the term ‘and was the first to establish the term across academic and business fields. He was disappointed with how ineffective workflow management technology was at the time, and with an intent to help organizations both understand and improve their processes using data. Over time, data started to proliferate and process mining became ever more important. Companies like Celonis pushed this concept even further to provide organizations a more concrete view of how their processes work, where they interact with each other, and where inefficiencies lie.

In that sense, how is process mining different from say, data analytics? Can you explain it with some examples from the industry?

In simple words, it’s about finding out how the processes are performing to find problems and areas for improvement in real time. I'll give you a very simple example. Imagine somebody's throwing a dart at a target and we are analyzing this. The difference between process mining and analytics, is that, analytics analyzes the outcome. Say where the dart has landed, how many times it landed, who was throwing the dart, and so on. That information is the final result of what has happened and based on that information you get some insight to your data. Whereas, process mining analyzes how you arrived at the outcome, like the entire process of throwing the dart and what are the different paths you can take (say from different angle in this case) to arrive at the final result and going forward, what is it that you need to consistently do to get your desired outcome. Just like that process mining can help manufacturers discover production paths, measure the performance of machinery, detect problems at any phase of production and understand the root causes of these problems. That said, it is an umbrella term for all data-driven process analysis techniques. It brings together the disciplines of data mining to gain insights into business processes.

So, can you explain how process mining can help manufacturers – in the factory floor and assembly lines?  

Due to its ability to quickly shift through the large amount of data in manufacturing control systems, process mining can often provide specific, actionable recommendations that may elude conventional manufacturing analytics methods. For example, it can objectively compare factory output, such as between facilities in different locations or between shifts at the same facility. It can also drill down to analyze what’s happening between any two arbitrary points in the manufacturing process to uncover a range of problems, including inventory shortages, repeated production errors and other bottlenecks. The process also helps in creating accurate digital twin models and preparing for interactive simulation. Because it uses data directly from your operational systems to create a visualization of your process steps, it is fast and not subject to error or subjectivity like traditional methods, e.g. process mapping and modeling. And as I said earlier, process mining also provides a layer of organizational context and allows you to look beyond the "what" of process operations and helps you dive into the "why" things are happening the way they are. 

Besides manufacturing, which other industries can use process mining and how do they gain from it? 

While process mining can be used extensively in the manufacturing sector, the technology is universal. The technology can be applied to any digital organization wherever there is a sequence of activities happening, and this is all being stored digitally. One can look at healthcare, retail, banking, telcos, etc., that are looking to analyze a process. Of course digital maturity matters. But if you look at the larger organization, all of them are digitally tracking their processes. It is applicable for any company that is processing large amounts of data or processing transactions and is storing it digitally and using a number of multiple digital systems to handle their end-to-end process. 

Where do you see process mining heading in the next 1-2 years? 

The current shift is towards object centric process mining, which allows organizations to map beyond single processes. It uses an object-centric event log. Instead of using case centric event data like traditional process mining, it uses object centric event data that allows an event to be related to multiple objects (e.g., sales orders, production orders and the like) and helps in understanding how all of these ‘objects’ interact with each other, in real time, can allow an organization to fine-tune operations in a way that previously would have required manual workarounds and some inefficient guesswork.

When Celonis forayed into the India market in 2021, it came up with a lot of plans for the India market – in terms of hiring and market expansion. What kind of expansion have you made so far and what plans do you have in the next 12 months?  

When we started in November 2021, we had a three-pronged strategy. We work closely with our global partners, who have a large presence in India. We are helping them build their own Celonis CoEs and we are helping them sell Celonis to their end customers and implementing Celonis thus using this as an engine to grow our (licenced) business. 

We have also expanded our custom base, in the global SIs the shared service centers space globally and in India as well. Third is, we’ve set up Celonis academy training in India. So, for this we have tied up with multiple academic institutions, engineering colleges and B-schools, like SP Jain, Dayananda Sagar, IIT Delhi, IIM Lucknow, to name a few.  We have enrolled over 45000 learners in the Celonis platform in the last one and a half year in India itself and aim to reach one lakh in the next one year. With so many new technologies in data science and AI evolving every other day, we are also regularly upskilling our employees and partners. Upskilling employees and likewise to our partners in different areas of data science including process mining is a regular feature and we do that through paid programs, free online training and mentorship. Also, part of its execution management initiative in India, Celonis has committed to investing over $100 million dollars into the Indian process mining industry and we expect to create more than a thousand jobs.

Companies like IBM and UiPath and others are also into process mining. What makes you different from those companies? 

We started off with process mining as our key expertise, and today, we have 3000 employees, operating across 16 countries and have close to 2000 customers, mostly large enterprises. Our USP is that we’re an end-to-end process mining provider and I can bet, the algorithms that we have, the kind of data that we can crunch, is way superior, to our competitors. Our solutions look at complex areas like procurement, bill paying, and inventory and searching for inefficiencies and duplications that can ultimately add up to huge savings. This is where we have the advantage. In August last year, we got a Series D funding of $1 billion that included participation from Activant Capital, Neuberger Berman, Alta Park Capital and Commonfund, alongside existing backers. With the funding that we've got, we've been able to invest, nurture and improve our core process mining engine. 

We also have a dedicated academy (Celonis Academy), a free online training platform for customers, partners, students and business analysts at all skill levels. We have a network of Process Mining professionals who meet regularly to exchange lessons and best practices, culminating in ‘Celosphere’, an annual conference with over 1,000 professionals across the globe. 

What are your plans for the India market in the next 12-18 months?  

We have over 250 partners globally – mostly large IT services and BPO consulting firms – and many of them have a significant presence in India. In the last two years, the company has partnered with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Tech Mahindra, HCL Tech, Accenture, Wipro, Capgemini and many others. In the next 12-18 months, we plan to grow in the India market – in the GCC and shared service space – primarily through our partners. Together with our new and existing partners, we would be focusing on larger enterprises, especially those having a mature digital footprint.