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9 questions about Process Intelligence, BPM, and AI, answered
PI, BPM, AI: It can be confusing to figure out what all of these acronyms mean, much less how they all fit together.
We’ll answer a few common questions about Process Intelligence (PI), Business Process Management (BPM), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help you understand the important similarities, differences, and relationships between the three.
1. What is Process Intelligence? What is the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform?
Process Intelligence (PI) is a combination of data-driven capabilities dedicated to the analysis and enhancement of processes and business performance. Process Intelligence is a growing category of software.
Celonis Process Intelligence uses process mining infused with process knowledge and AI to let you see your processes as they truly are. Put simply: it’s technology that knows how your business flows, and allows you to take action on your processes.
The Celonis Process Intelligence Platform layers on top of your systems of record and data platforms, feeding process insights to BI, automations, cloud applications, and AI, and enabling you to orchestrate actions and generate meaningful predictions, recommendations, and solutions. The Platform has a variety of capabilities, applications, and integrated partner technologies, including process mining, task mining, process monitoring, process modeling, process orchestration, and AI.
Learn more: Process Intelligence 101
2. What is process mining (and why are we talking about it)?
To understand the relationships between AI, BPM, and Process Intelligence, it’s important to understand what process mining is.
Process mining is a method to use the data generated by your systems to understand how things in your enterprise happen. It uses event logs generated by your transactional IT systems and systems of record (ERPs, CRMs, and more) to follow and show your processes as they actually happen, in real time. Anywhere there are systems of record, you can use process mining to understand how your processes really run across those systems of record.
Read more: What is Process Mining?
3. How does process mining relate to Process Intelligence?
Process mining is a capability of Process Intelligence and a technology that’s used within the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform. It’s one of the technologies supporting the Platform’s features. Celonis Process Intelligence also includes many other capabilities, such as process modeling, process orchestration, process simulation, and more.
4. What is BPM?
Quite simply, Business Process Management (BPM) is what it sounds like: techniques, technologies, and practices for managing business processes. It usually focuses more heavily on the people and tasks involved with a process and the internal workings of an organization, rather than on what’s happening within and across systems (although that can factor in).
Many businesses practice some form of BPM, and it’s especially useful to help organizations understand and strategically manage change over time from things like growth or contraction, technological advances, and restructuring. When used well, BPM can be a powerful tool.
Business Process Management software was created to help with the practice of BPM. In 2023, Celonis acquired Symbio, an AI-driven BPM software, to further expand the Celonis Process Intelligence platform’s BPM capabilities.
5. How is BPM different from process mining and Celonis Process Intelligence?
This is a bit of a trick question! Celonis Process Intelligence includes both process mining and BPM within the Platform, among many other capabilities. Process mining and BPM work well together because they have some overlap (notably, a focus on leveraging processes to understand how things happen), but they differ in their methods and contexts:
Process mining uses event logs to follow processes from beginning to end across an organization’s tech landscape, with a focus on how things are happening within software and systems. Process mining’s goal is to show a process as it actually happens in real time within your systems and technology, using your organization’s real data. But, by extension, Process Mining also reveals how people interact with technology and processes.
BPM prioritizes analyzing, mapping, modeling, and optimizing how processes are shaped and enacted by practices and people — though because people use many different systems, apps, and software for their jobs, it increasingly overlaps with technologies, too. BPM relies heavily on input from people to help make their enterprise’s inner workings, institutional knowledge, and legacy practices documentable, repeatable, and improvable. Process modeling and mapping, which are often integral parts of BPM, help people figure out how, where, when, and with whom a process is meant to happen.
As you can probably guess, the reality of a process in action does not always align with the version laid out by BPM — hence the need for both BPM and process mining for full process understanding and optimization.
6. If a business is using PI, why would it also want BPM?
Through the combination of process mining, BPM, and the Process Intelligence Platform’s many other capabilities, businesses can not only figure out how things are happening, but better model how and with whom things should happen, whether across technologies or across the actual people making up the organization.
When combined with PI, BPM broadens the tools at businesses’ disposal for following, analyzing, and improving processes, both within software and technology and within departments and job roles.
Watch the on-demand webinar: Process Management with Celonis
7. How are AI and BPM related?
AI is integrated into Celonis’ BPM capabilities to help make building models easier for users.
BPM itself can also help AI work better. To function well, AI tools need complete, contextual information about the organizations in which they’re being deployed — basically, AI needs to understand how the business runs.
The information that’s contained within process models gives that information to AI. For an organization without a formalized BPM practice or BPM software, it would be difficult to provide this crucial input as part of successful AI deployment.
8. How are AI and Celonis PI related?
AI and Celonis PI are related in two ways:
AI is an important part of the Celonis Process Intelligence platform that makes the platform more powerful and easier to use .
Celonis Process Intelligence plays a key role in better enabling AI for many enterprises. Basically, PI can help make your own AI — or AI you’re leveraging from other vendors — work better.
Within the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform, machine learning has been used for years to drive continuous improvements in performance for customers, leading to tens of millions of dollars in value created. In recent years, Celonis added large language model (LLM) capabilities, launching conversational Process Copilots to help users navigate dashboards and make the best use of the platform.
Read more: Celonis taps AI to make Process Intelligence more broadly available to users, systems of record
Process Intelligence is also crucial to making companies’ own AI investments and AI tools work. AI performs best when it has up-to-date, contextual information about the systems and processes it’s working within. Without the process insights generated by PI, this contextual information can be hard to provide. PI helps companies put AI to work by giving AI the data it needs to work well. This supercharges AI tools, yielding greater accuracy and speed, more opportunities for automation and orchestration, and higher user satisfaction.
Read more: Make AI work for your enterprise
9. What’s an example of how a business might use AI, process mining, Process Intelligence, and BPM together?
Imagine you’re trying to figure out the status of a specific invoice. Here’s how you could use AI, process mining, Process Intelligence, and BPM together to get some answers:
In the Celonis Process Intelligence platform, you might ask an AI Copilot, “What’s the status of this invoice?”
Then, through process mining, the Platform would show you the current status of the invoice — whether it’s been created, sent, blocked, etc.
Once you know where the invoice is and what’s happening with it, you could use BPM capabilities to check the most up-to-date process model, determine which people or departments are meant to be involved with the invoice, and get in touch with them to fix, send, or otherwise help with the invoice.
After all of this, you could use Celonis to better understand and improve the process, whether through updating your org’s process mapping and modeling, uncovering opportunities for automation, or setting up alerts to help relevant people identify and resolve process holdups more quickly and easily.
Summary: How Process Intelligence, BPM, and AI work together
If you’re still feeling a bit underwater, just use this quick summary: In the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform, process mining uses your tech’s data to show you what’s really going on, while BPM helps you understand who and what is involved in a process, and what should be happening. Celonis groups all of these capabilities (along with many others) in one Platform powered by your real data, and layers in AI to make queries easier to navigate, improvement opportunities easier to find, and actions easier to take.
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