Advances in business process mining power a digital twin of the organization

Celonis, a leader in process mining technology, has announced several significant enhancements to its process mining capabilities. The most important advance will help organizations analyze multiple processes simultaneously to create a digital twin of the organization (DTO). 

Although other process mining vendors (and Gartner) have used the term DTO in the past, prior approaches took a piecemeal approach, analyzing each process separately. Celonis CEO Alex Rinke told VentureBeat that with Process Sphere, several engineering enhancements have boosted process mining analytics performance over 100 times, enabling multi-object analytics.

This can simplify the experience for business users who are not process experts, reduce the complexity of analyzing multiple processes, and help the user identify how processes affect each other. 

Here are the key new announcements:

• Process Sphere analyzes multiple connected processes to power a digital twin of the organization.
• Business Miner combines process and business intelligence into simplified experiences for business users.
• Accounts-receivable apps help businesses fight inflation.
• Emporix partnership improves process execution across business partners.

Process Sphere takes process mining into the third dimension

Celonis’s biggest news is the debut of Process Sphere, which helps analyze multiple processes from the perspectives of different kinds of users. For example, a given business process such as quote-to-cash or order-to-pay may span multiple apps covering enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM).

The new Process Sphere capabilities provide a 3D perspective on how processes affect each other, much as an MRI analyzes your body from multiple angles to paint a three-dimensional view. Rinke explained, “Businesses do not just have one process. They have many processes that interact with each other and are all important to drive performance. You need a 3D understanding to drive deeper optimization.”

Multi-object process mining can help tease apart how events relate to each other and to different objects. For example, shipping a bike depends on other processes to ensure individual components like brakes are in stock so the bike can be manufactured and shipped on time.

Process mining performs complex analytics across millions of records to correlate log data in ERP, CRM and SCM systems with a chain of events in a process. Rinke said that by optimizing these algorithms’ performance over 100 times over the last couple of years, Celonis has gotten much closer to a real DTO.

“With a digital twin of the organization, we can look at how all processes in a company can interact at the same time,” he said. 

Different business users, such as accountants, product managers and supply chain experts, can examine the complex relationships among business objects like orders, requisitions, invoices and shipments. This can provide insight into bottlenecks in specific processes and identify ways minor delays in one process can have more significant impacts on other parts of the organization. 

Simplifying the user experience

A digital twin of an organization is much more abstract than digital twins of physical things like buildings or cars. Processes are traditionally presented and explored through complex spaghetti diagrams showing the various steps and alternative paths involved in each process. Process Sphere improves upon this with color-coded lines that look more like a subway map. 

But this is still a little too complex for users who may not be familiar with process analytics. So Celonis developed Business Miner as a more simplified approach to presenting insights about business processes in the context of a business’s current challenges.

“The idea with Business Miner was to create an experience that is extremely easy to use,” Rinke explained. “[Even if] business users don’t even know what a process is … they can still save millions of dollars.” Business users can analyze the way work flows across ERP, SCM and CRM systems to identify opportunities for improvement or cost reduction. 

For example, an accounting user could explore factors affecting the percentage rate of on-time payments; assess the specific value of increasing the rate; and receive guidance on actionable steps to do so. The tools also let users weave charts, graphs and recommendations into consolidated reports and action lists they can share with other team members. 

New apps for accounts receivable, ecommerce

Celonis is also combining these enhancements with its execution management expertise, building low-code applications to support several domain-specific applications. For example, a new set of accounts-receivable apps help enterprises boost working capital and reduce costs of collections management, credit management and dispute management.

Guided experiences for accounts receivable

These new apps combine information about the processes with the data that flows through them. Companies can bring together data about customers, balance and contracts from transactional and analytical systems. This can help accounts-receivable teams identify, prioritize and pursue the most impactful actions. It can also help streamline and automate processes for collections, disputes and credit. 

“The whole idea is we can surface and provide value through guided experiences,” Rinke explained.

Partnering with Emporix to optimize ecommerce adjustments

Celonis has also partnered with Emporix on the Commerce Execution Platform to automatically optimize ecommerce processes affecting business partners. This will help enterprises automatically tune workflows in response to changes in customer demand, inventory, or supplier and fulfillment status. 

Traditional B2B commerce systems typically require manual intervention to adapt to changes in pricing, stock or customer behavior. The new tool allows companies to monitor and adjust their end-customer interactions using process intelligence signals. For example, if the system determines a shipment is likely to be late, it can recommend an alternative. 

“I think this will redefine the future of enterprise apps,” Rinke said. “When you have this cross-process understanding and intelligence, you can make things much better. It applies to the front office, back office and supply chain. This changes how you manage and optimize the performance of your business. It becomes a performance layer on top of your applications and business processes.”