Celosphere 2022: Celonis once again expands the universe of process intelligence

Last week, process intelligence decacorn Celonis held its annual customer conference, Celosphere. This in-person event was in Celonis’ founding city of Munich. The high energy was palpable among its 2,000+ attendees after three long years of virtual get-togethers. Celonis grew at dizzying rates in those three years. More importantly, it set up a much broader network of technology and services partners, rounding out the analyst and client representatives at Celosphere.

Three product announcements targeted cross-functional process views, business user-friendliness, and task mining

Celonis co-founder and co-CEO Alex Rinke (pictured) spoke at Celosphere about reinvention and growth by gaining completely new perspectives. The company made three product announcements in line with these themes: Process Sphere (3D process views), Business Miner (helping individuals consume insights), and Task Mining (revamped with new capabilities). HFS’ takes on the new capabilities follow:

• Process Sphere: This unique capability provides a visual subway map of your entire business, showing the journey of interrelated orders and process data across different departments. Celonis displayed data visualization that literally added a third dimension to a typical process map, showing interdependencies in a new way. Celonis’ predecessor to this product employed multi-event log analysis, but the Process Sphere’s visualization drives home the idea of cross-functional coordination to improve organizational performance. This announcement aligns well with our OneOffice concept—connecting data and processes that help you bust siloes and find value in the intersection of multiple processes and your entire business.
• Business Miner: This product recognizes that organizational change doesn’t happen with one small team of process analysts crunching numbers; instead, change happens when most employees can access, understand, and put meaningful information to use. Business Miner is built for non-technical teams, and it uses a Q&A-based interface to help employees explore relevant process insights and share thoughts with colleagues directly on the platform. This product sounds like it will go a long way in helping adoption within organizations. Software built for the business needs to be simple, intuitive, and action-oriented, keeping in mind the tremendous amount of change management involved in process transformation. This cause is one worth investing in and an area where we’ve already seen progress in the broader data and analytics market with self-serve business intelligence platforms.
• Task Mining: Celonis has had a task mining product for a while now, but thus far, its focus has been on its process mining technology and EMS platform. Task mining has grown as a sub-category in the last few years, urging the process intelligence leader to give it the attention it deserves as a complementary piece of the process data puzzle. At the event, Celonis emphasized that its focus with the revamped task mining product was on workforce productivity and employee experience, a distinction that matters, as task tracking can be far more intrusive to an employee’s workday. The enhanced capability, for example, offered only team-level comparisons of work tasks and applications versus calling out specific individual task data.

With new capabilities comes new complexity

Implementing emerging technologies in a large organization is never easy; process intelligence is no different in this respect. Many process intelligence initiatives suffer from persisting challenges in complex data integration, lack of talent, and data quality issues. Celonis expanded the universe of process mining with the Execution Management System (EMS), going from process insights into action and automation. Many customers we’ve spoken to, including some at the Celosphere event, have yet to catch up on the EMS and are still figuring out how to get the basics right. Our research shows that only up to 29% of process intelligence initiatives are considered scaled-up and industrialized by enterprise leaders.

Celonis’ new launches are promising and once again expand the universe—bringing in functionality for non-technical users and developing entirely new types of process insights. What is missing, then, is Celonis’ vision for how all its existing and new intellectual property will work together with partner apps and solutions. Both mature and new process intelligence practitioners would benefit immensely from a stitched-together perspective to help them contextualize their use of Celonis and the path ahead.

The Bottom Line: Celonis continues to invest in innovation with its new product lineup. Now it must help its clients piece together all their complexity to find success.

Celonis’ CMO Dave Peterson’s kick-off emphasized the company’s commitment to delivering measurable business value and finding ways to push sustainability for its customers forward. That’s a tall order in terms of impact for any emerging technology startup. But with Celonis’ increasingly global clientele and its investments in customer success programs, it just might get there.