4 min

During Celosphere, Celonis made several announcements around expansions of the Exucution Management platform that the company offers. However, the main focus was on the company’s bigger plans. The Celonis ecosystem is ‘on fire’, as co-CEO Alexander Rinke called it in a call with press and analysts that we attended. To fuel this fire a little further, Celonis is even making its platform available to consultants for free.

When we first wrote about Celonis in 2017, we were mostly talking about process mining. You turned to Celonis if you wanted to map business processes very accurately. “We were the leading x-ray machine for business processes,” as Rinke calls it during the call. But just having insight into the processes isn’t enough. Celonis realized this too, of course, so they wanted to think and look beyond process mining. The process mining basis is in place and is only getting better, but the focus had to shift elsewhere. That became execution management. Put briefly, it links actions to the insights from process mining. That was missing before. That’s why nowadays you only hear Celonis talk about EMS (Execution Management System) and hardly ever about process mining alone. It’s no different at Celosphere 2021.

Lots of potential

Process mining and Execution Management have taken off in recent years. This is not surprising in itself, as processes within organizations are usually very complex. “There is nothing as horizontal as processes,” states Rinke. That is, a process runs across all kinds of environments within your organization. With the ever-increasing complexity in the IT landscape, processes will also only become more complex.

This horizontal nature of processes and their increasing complexity largely explain why process mining has become so important for organizations. You can realize enormous savings with it. We often hear these kinds of claims from suppliers. At Celonis, however, they certainly dare to take up the challenge. For example, a few months ago, major newspapers in the US carried advertisements promising to find at least $10 million in savings within organizations’ processes. If Celonis can’t deliver, it will donate 100,000 dollars to charity. No doubt there will be conditions attached to this, but this kind of action shows that Celonis is very sure of its technology and platform.

New features

During Celosphere 2021 Celonis has announced several new features. As far as we are concerned, three stand out.

  • Easier and faster access to process data: real-time data ingestion is now also possible from Snowflake, Coupa and Salesforce Platform Events. There is now also a low-code extractor, with which you can relatively easily extract data from other systems that can be linked via an API.
  • Addition of an ML-based simulator: to better plan and predict the impact of changes in processes, you can now use a simulator. In addition, a new AI-powered OCR module allows you to deduplicate invoices more easily.
  • Integromat fully integrated: From now on you can automate things extensively thanks to more than 1,000 automations and 10,000 execution actions offered by Celonis. The capabilities of Integromat, which was acquired last year, are now fully integrated into the Celonis platform.

When it comes to new functionality, the ecosystem surrounding the Celonis platform is also very important during Celosphere. According to Rinke, the ecosystem has substantial momentum at the moment. In the past year Celonis has built several new execution apps. Examples of these types of apps are Order Management, Inventory Management and Procurement Management. These apps monitor things proactively and in real time, in order to, for example, detect errors in the supply chain in time and be able to take action on them. In addition to the three new apps built by Celonis, no fewer than 80 have been built by partners. This indicates that they also see the added value of Celonis’ platform.

Celonis gives it away for free

However, Celosphere’s most notable announcement was not about the platform itself. That is, not about the functionality of the platform. Indeed, following the action with the ads in major US newspapers, Celonis has come up with another sign of confidence. The company wants to give its Celonis for Consulting branch a huge boost and is going to offer the platform for free to all consultants who want to use it.

Currently, more than 1,400 partners are in the C4C program. This allows partners to demonstrate the added value of the Celonis Execution Management Platform and deploy it to their customers. Through this latest move, the number of partners in C4C should increase to more than a million. Malhar Kamdar, Celonis’ Chief Ecosystem Officer, called this “democratizing process mining and execution management” during the call.

This new program has two parts. The first part is what Celonis calls the “X-ray” portion. This gives consultants access to the process mining component of the platform. The second part is the “Execution” part. This allows consultants to give their clients access to the execution management component.

As mentioned, consultants can initially use the platform for free. Of course, those consultants do charge a fee for their clients. The hope and expectation at Celonis is that consultants will eventually start paying for their license as well, once they see the added value of the platform.