Clarity and control over business processes is a critical capability for every organization. None more so than global medical device manufacturer Karl Storz, where the effectiveness of their processes impacts patient outcomes. With Celonis Process Management, they’re finally able to put their processes under the knife.
Context: A vital commitment to process excellence
Process excellence is in global medtech manufacturer Karl Storz’s DNA. Etienne Kneschke, Executive Director Global Business Process Management, literally wrote a book about it. Co-authored with Simon Geisenberger, Mission Possible: The Process Excellence Enterprise discusses why enterprises need to manage processes and process-related information through a single source if they are to achieve process excellence.
A passionate advocate of business process management (BPM), with more than 12 years of experience, Kneschke led the company’s implementation of the Celonis platform in 2019. With a holistic approach using Symbio process management and Celonis Process Intelligence in conjunction, Karl Storz eventually switched to Celonis Process Management when the two companies joined forces in 2023. Kneschke continues to expand new use cases, moving from just streamlining processes and making them more efficient to helping to meet quality criteria.
As the market leader in manufacturing endoscopy equipment, integrated operating room solutions and robotic surgery, quality control is one of Karl Storz’s most important areas of business value. In their industry, patient safety and care is on the line when it comes to the quality of products and business processes. End-to-end process optimization is a lifeline for maintaining consistent, high-quality service levels.
Challenge: Process management suffering from a lack of visibility
Key process excellence objectives included saving costs and increasing efficiency – across their vast product range and 70 sites in 40 countries – primarily by utilizing insights gained from connecting BPM with Celonis process mining.
Kneschke and his team understand that generating maximum impact from business process management needs a holistic approach that brings all business systems, processes and BPM technologies together. That included over 600 end-to-end processes they were analyzing through their Symbio BPM system.
Karl Storz also has to meet a lot of requirements when they change any processes. So information architecture, risks, controls, standards and policies all need taking into consideration and understanding completely.
“The more we understand what we do, the better the transformation journey will be.”
Etienne Kneschke, Executive Director Global Business Process Management, Karl Storz
A consistent process view is needed to meet these requirements. This ensures transparency across all manual and digital processes at all times, and enables users to manage the relevant rules and regulations efficiently and effectively. In addition, departments must use consistent terminology, and views of processes must be harmonized to avoid fragmentation that leads to increased communication efforts, which in turn makes it more difficult to optimize processes.
Solution: Celonis enables triaging and remedying in one unified solution
Karl Storz has nine core processes connected to Celonis, focusing mainly on operational processes such as Order-to-Cash, Purchase-to-Pay, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable.
Celonis Process Management allows them to combine BPM and process mining in one platform, so they can really keep process management alive – from seeing how well they’re performing to operationalizing process flows. Celonis’ comprehensive, unified process management solution enables this by capturing all aspects of operations, including manual tasks, while adding insights on risks, controls, and compliance.
Combining Karl Storz’s mining and modeling data in one process intelligence view has made it easier for teams to explore deeper process insights. This has helped them to identify deviations between target and actual processes for effective management, optimization, and compliance adherence. They can then better understand throughput time across their core processes, improving agility and quality control.
“With Celonis, you can bring transparency into your complexity, but you can also operationalize your process management by improving processes directly.”
Etienne Kneschke, Executive Director Global Business Process Management, Karl Storz
To drive adoption, Karl Storz has established a Center of Excellence (CoE). Users across the business total 220 in Celonis Process Mining and more than 1,000 in Celonis Process Management. The CoE also helps standardize and align terminology, process views and workflows across departments – giving everyone a common language for how the business runs, and enabling teams and AI to truly speak the language of the business.
Vision: Breathing new life into business processes
Kneschke continues to pursue his mission of gaining a truly holistic picture across the entire organization, exploring new ways of bringing process management and process mining even closer together.
The next step is to interlink the Celonis platform with further management systems like enterprise risk management and quality management. Karl Storz would also like to implement sustainability and ESG as part of their Celonis Process Management scope.
Kneschke believes that cultural change is possible when process intelligence is democratized. With process insights and actions now freely coursing through the business, process excellence is alive and well at Karl Storz.
“Celonis has a lot of ideas and there’s a big dynamic to further develop their Process Intelligence system to bring more value to the surface, to drive process management across the company, and to provide this to all employees.”
Etienne Kneschke, Executive Director Global Business Process Management, Karl Storz
