Key words and terms from the worlds of Process Intelligence, process mining, and business improvement at large.
The money a company owes to its suppliers and vendors.
Can also be used for the name of a department or job.
Use it in a sentence: Accounts payable departments the world over are using process intelligence to boost on-time payment while reducing operating costs.
The money a customer owes to a company for goods or services delivered.
Can also be used for the name of a department or job.
Use it in a sentence: Improve your accounts receivable process and you’ll optimize cash flow and reduce outstanding debts.
A way to define an automated process flow. Action Flows can consist of multiple events, decision points and alternative routes, as well as involve an arbitrary number of different applications.
Use it in a sentence: Action Flows provide out-of-the-box integrations and intelligent automation to trigger actions in operational systems, such as SAP, Google Apps, and ServiceNow.
The different process steps of the case, which are used to reconstruct the process flow.
An iterative approach to the analysis and improvement of business processes. It aims to accelerate adaptation and refinement - all based on what the data says.
Computer program designed and built to address a specific issue or opportunity.
Use it in a sentence: Celonis apps include the Free-Text Requisition App, which improves spend under management by quickly converting free-text requisitions to POs using ML-based algorithms to recommend historically purchased materials or catalog items.
The act of putting technology in the driver’s seat to take action – namely on improving a process.
Use it in a sentence: Automation shouldn’t be the first step in process improvement; it should only come after you use process mining to understand your processes.
A collective term for the strategies, technologies and processes that organizations use to turn their data into actionable insight. With business intelligence, companies collate, integrate, analyze and visualize data from across their operations - unifying multiple (often unconnected) datasets into a coherent, interrogable source of business truth.
Use it in a sentence: By turning big data into actionable insights, business intelligence delivers significant benefits to a business. These include: making better decisions, improving efficiency and productivity, enhancing customer experience, and reducing operational risk.
A capability of the Celonis Process Intelligence platform that lets you find and fix broken processes using an easy-to-use question-and-answer-based interface.
Use it in a sentence: Business Miner enables anyone, including users with limited technical knowledge, to quickly and easily begin to discover and share actionable process insights across the enterprise.
An instance of the object you follow through the process. A case depicts a single process path, such as a sales order item moving through an order-to-cash process.
A unique reference number to document all activities and timestamps that are directly related to each case.
The time span between a company's cash outflow for production costs and the inflow from sales.
A reduction to the amount of an invoice that a buyer owes. Offered to incentivize a buyer to pay a bill before the scheduled due date.
Use it in a sentence: Kraft Heinz, using Celonis, got end-to-end visibility across Accounts Receivable to better renegotiate cash discounts.
The net amount of money (cash and cash equivalents) that goes into a company and out of the same company over a period of time.
Use it in a sentence: Cash flow optimization is a top priority for most companies to combat inflation and uncertainty. Here are four quick ways to optimize cash flow and how Celonis can help drive rapid impact.
The team responsible for all training programs for our customers, partners, and Celonauts.
An application created by Celonis that's tailored to a specific business process and accessed from the Marketplace.
A program designed specially for consultants. It lets you use the functionality of the Celonis Platform to turn process insights into client value and accelerate & codify insights with apps.
Use it in a sentence: Consultants at 2000+ consulting firms are already using Celonis for Consulting to help with their projects.
A light version of Celonis where users receive immediate access to and enjoy the power of the world's #1 Process Intelligence technology.
The digital hub for hundreds of high-quality, pre-packaged Process Intelligence apps and solutions.
The Celonis Marketplace contains hundreds of assets, divided into four types: Apps, Connectors, Experiences, Action Flows. Some are out-of-the-box Celonis apps, others are built with and by our Partners.
The development platform to build, test, and edit Celonis apps in a single, low-code interface.
Use it in a sentence: You can build bespoke views with custom dashboards in the Celonis Studio.
Central hub for quantifying the business impact of Celonis transformation efforts.
Use it in a sentence: Teams can visualize outcomes across processes, value stages, and objectives in one place. Thanks to the Control Center, teams can easily answer questions like: “What programs are we running with Celonis?" and "How are these programs creating value?".
The Celonis online community that offers resources for Celonis beginners and veterans.
Use it in a sentence: On Celopeers, you can connect with other Celonis users, join your local user group, get information on the latest Celonis product releases, and get support from the Celonis Customer Support team.
The annual user conference for customers and partners of Celonis. This global gathering of the Celonis community sees thousands of process experts come together to learn, share, and take their business performance and careers to the next level.
Use it in a sentence: Celosphere offers attendees the choice of over a hundred different sessions to listen-in on, all carried out by leading industry executives, analysts and process excellence experts. – ERP today.
The processes involved in the guiding of successful change within an organization. Change management can include a number of stages from planning and execution to monitoring and embedding change. Standard changes or business projects that might require change management include: upgrading or replacing a critical system, rolling out a new product line, and restructuring the organization.
Use it in a sentence: The three pillars of effective change management are: people, processes, technology. Trying to make changement management work without addressing all three will cause problems.
A method of using event logs to check whether or not your as-is processes are proceeding as intended by comparing them to a to-be process model.
Pre-built extraction and transformation capabilities to quickly connect your process data to the Celonis platform.
The replication of an event across different cases, possibly leading to unintentional duplication. Convergence can cause misleading diagnostics.
Use it in a sentence: Squeezing reality into simple event logs creates distortions. It can unintentionally replicate events, which is known as convergence. More here.
Evaluation of a customer’s previous credit behavior.
Use it in a sentence: If you use Celonis to know who your dependable customers are, you’ll be able to skip the credit check and speed up orders by days.
Short for credit memorandum and occasionally known as a credit note, a credit memo officially acknowledges a customer is owed money. That money can be applied to future purchases of goods and services. A credit memo is different from a refund because it provides credit for a future invoice amount, not cash, to the customer account.
Use it in a sentence: A credit memo contains important information, including: the purchase order number, date of purchase, original invoice number, corresponding invoice date, payment terms, billing details, buyer shipping address, prices, quantities, and more. A credit memo will also include the reason it was created and issued.
The total amount of time it takes to complete a process, from start to finish. The concept of cycle time comes from lean manufacturing, where it refers to the production time for one unit or item. The metric has since been adopted across many other sectors and business functions — from finance to customer service to project management. Its exact definition varies depending on the process to which it is applied.
The exploration and analysis of raw data to transform it into valuable information used to solve business problems.
Use it in a sentence: Today’s process mining reflects a powerful combination of process science, which is the intricate study of processes, and data science, which means finding the insights in the data generated by the various parts of those processes. More here.
The number of days that pass before a company pays outstanding invoices.
Read: 6 days payable outstanding KPIs you should know about.
The number of days that pass before a company gets paid for sales made.
When an activity happens outside of the intended process mining path.
A digital representation of a real-world entity. In the world of process mining, a digital twin is a virtual representation of a real-world process. Digital twins allow teams to simulate process improvements without having to disturb the process until they know the changes will be beneficial.
Use in a sentence: The Celonis Process Intelligence Graph builds a system-agnostic process digital twin of a business and combines it with the business context in which the organization operates. It shows how the business is running, where and how things could run better, and how teams can capture the value hiding within the business.
What occurs happens when there may be multiple instances of the same activity within a single case.
Use it in a sentence: Squeezing reality into simple event logs creates distortions. It can lead to the loss of causal relations, which is called divergence. More here.
An invoice mistakenly issued or processed more than once, leading to the possibility of the same bill being paid multiple times.
When a company pays an invoice or bill twice.
Use it in a sentence: Deutsche Telekom saved more than €66M by optimizing its Procure-to-Pay process to tackle duplicate payments and cash discount losses.
A network of organizations complementing the skills and reach of each other, working together to drive a certain solution forward.
Use it in a sentence: At Celonis, our Ecosystem is made up of business and technology experts across all industries and it spans the entire globe.
A digital representation of a real-world occurrence that happened, at a single moment in time, to one or more objects connected to your business. For example, a customer paying an invoice, a user creating a purchase order for a vendor's product, or a warehouse shipping an order.
Use it in a sentence: The event of shipping an order involves both the warehouse the order shipped from, and the order that was shipped.
Digital recording of an action that happened in a software system. All event logs have a case ID, an activity, and a timestamp.
A definition of an event that happens to one or more objects during a business process (such as shipping an order), what attributes it has, and its relationships to objects.
Tool to create reusable data extractors for any system and automatically tag and contextualize data from connected systems.
The type of request made by requisitioners when they manually create a request rather than picking a standard vendor with prenegotiated contract terms.
The type of artificial intelligence that is capable of creating new and original content. It often does this in response to prompts.
Use it in a sentence: Generative AI helps process mining solutions interact with humans more easily and efficiently through natural language processing and generation.
Familiar term used to describe a process working as originally designed and without exceptions, workarounds, or detours.
Use it in a sentence: Change-makers use Celonis to show their teams and bosses how processes no longer follow the ‘happy path’ but how they can again by making the right data-backed interventions.
The supervision of stock levels, orders, storage, and distribution to ensure optimal availability of products, reducing costs and meeting demand efficiently, while preventing overstocking or stockouts.
Use it in a sentence: Inventory management done well leads to improved material availability, reduced operating costs, and optimized working capital.
A document sent by a business to a buyer detailing the products and services provided to the buyer by the business. An invoice acts as the official payment request for the products and services concerned.
Key Performance Indicator.
A measurement that helps teams understand how the business – or a certain part of it – is performing overall.
The end-to-end process that starts with someone’s intent to buy a product and ends with the fulfillment of the sale.
Use it in a sentence: Mark’s team is now using Celonis in Lead-to-order to know whether they can hit their billion-pound revenue target in two years' time.
The combination of the Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma methodologies. Lean Six Sigma is an approach to process improvement that helps make sure initiatives are well-planned, executed, and monitored for sustained results by using a methodology called DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control).
A type of artificial intelligence that enables computer systems to learn from data and algorithms. In doing so, machine learning enables AI to learn in a similar way to humans and improve performance over time.
A method of trying to uncover how processes work without the use of modern technology. Manal process mapping often sees teams create a process map in the form of a flowchart or diagram.
The core information essential to the running of a business day-to-day.
Master data typically includes information like product and service descriptions, financial data like account numbers, and location information like office addresses and trading territories.
The steps taken in the pursuit of always up-to-date and accurate master data. Can include improvements to product, supplier, or customer data.
Term to describe what happens when requisitioners do not adhere to internal procurement processes and fail to make use of existing procurement contracts.
The opposite to maverick buying is spend under management.
Use it in a sentence: Celonis can notify category managers of maverick buying repeat offenders, reject maverick purchases, and contact vendors repeatedly fulfilling maverick purchases. More here.
Measurement for how many invoices customers settle within the agreed payment terms. Paid-on-time-rate reflects the efficiency of credit management and customer reliability, directly impacting cash flow and financial health by minimizing late payments and associated risks.
Use it in a sentence: Deutsche Telekom used Celonis to unlock a cash discount rate of 96% and a paid-on-time rate of more than 90%.
Predictive AI learns from historical data and uses it to predict the likelihood of future events. Process mining uses this kind of AI to anticipate and prevent process problems and also find the root causes of problems that happen.
The way something gets done. A process is a series of steps and decisions involved in completing a task. Processes make up every aspect of our leisure and work.
Use it in a sentence: A process is the series of steps that are taken in a particular order to achieve a specific result. Read more here.
A tool to see how your target processes compare with your processes as they currently run.
Use it in a sentence: Visualize all deviations and identify root causes in a single view with the Process Adherence Manager.
The review and close examination of an enterprise’s processes.
Process analysis sees teams dig into the root causes of process issues and quantify how they’re impacting key performance indicators.
Use it in a sentence: Process analysis can be difficult in large, complex organizations, but with a Process Intelligence platform you can easily conduct process analysis at every level of your enterprise.
An artificial intelligence tool that turns natural language requests into process insights.
Use it in a sentence: Process Copilot provides insights into KPI trends and their root causes; the user simply types in a question to see relevant, tailored charts and graphs.
Any type of record generated by a business process. Process data can include activity sequences, timestamps, event logs, and process variants.
Use it in a sentence: Celonis uses process data combined with over a decade of our own process knowledge and AI to generate a customer’s Process Intelligence Graph.
A capability of the Celonis Process Intelligence platform that allows you to build an enterprise map by modeling your processes, in a common view that can be shared between your business and IT – from business processes to customer journeys, enterprise architecture, and org structure.
Use in a sentence: Process Designer makes it easier to build target models and supports you with suggestions made by generative AI that factors in context on how your business operates.
The recorded occurrence of a specific activity within a process, marked with a timestamp and relevant attributes.
Process events are analyzed to uncover process flows and optimize operations through data-driven insights.
The pursuit and achievement of optimizing processes to the extent they make an active contribution to value creation across the top, bottom, and green lines.
Discover more about process excellence here.
A tool that uses explorative analysis to show how processes run based on the frequency of activities performed.
Use it in a sentence: Illuminating the complex ways in which objects and events interact, Process Explorer helps you find value opportunities within and across your processes — with limited technical expertise required.
Representation of the sequence and dependencies of activities within a business process. It visualizes the paths and interactions between events, revealing bottlenecks, deviations, and opportunities for process improvement.
Use it in a sentence: A process mining solution visualizes and validates process flows, showing how the many objects and events in the system interact.
The act(s) of examining, documenting, and mapping out the various steps of a process, and then pinpointing and eliminating pain points.
A combination of system data, process knowledge, and AI that knows how your business flows
Use it in a sentence: That LLM is genuinely smart now it’s using Process Intelligence
A system-agnostic, enriched digital twin of a business.
A Process Intelligence Graph provides a single Process Intelligence layer that supports improvements, automation, and system transformation across all applications. It sits at the heart of the Celonis platform and is a key enabler for emerging technologies like Generative AI.
Use it in a sentence: The Celonis Process Intelligence Graph is the connective tissue at the heart of the Celonis platform, helping teams understand how objects and events interact, how processes are interconnected, how the business runs, and how it can run even better.
The suite of business functionality and developer functionality built by Celonis that uses process mining, task mining, AI, and automation to improve business processes and systems.
Accumulated understanding of how common business processes often progress.
Use it in a sentence: The process knowledge that Celonis has built into the Process Intelligence Graph draws on more than a decade of process mining experience.
The continued design and governance of processes to ensure they are working as intended.
Every step of a business process leaves a digital footprint in transactional systems in the form of event log data. Process mining uses this event log data to create a living picture of what actual processes really look like, which does not always match what people expect processes to look like.
Method for tracking and regularly evaluating key data points associated with a certain process or processes.
Use it in a sentence: My company uses process monitoring to see how closely our AP teams are adhering to the new processes.
Tool to view and monitor processes and systems. With Process Navigator, every employee can access their processes, relevant documentation, org hierarchies, and their roles and responsibilities.
Process Navigator simplifies the onboarding of your processes and keeping track of any changes.
Use it in a sentence: With Process Navigator, you give every employee a personalized repository of processes and their wider operational context, embedded into everyday systems like Microsoft Teams, so they know what steps to take, when, and in which systems.
The combination of technologies, solutions, and tactics to view, analyze and improve processes with the aim of achieving maximum efficiency and quality. Process optimization can include removing steps, automating interventions otherwise done by people, and re-designing the process entirely.
The co-ordination, synchronization, and monitoring of different business processes.
Discover more: How AI and process orchestration bring us a giant leap closer to the autonomous enterprise.
The scientific field concerned with studying the nature of change. It combines knowledge from information technology and knowledge from management sciences to improve and run operational processes.
Use it in a sentence: Today’s process mining reflects a powerful combination of process science, which is the intricate study of processes, and data science, which means finding the insights in the data generated by the various parts of those processes. Read more here.
A tool to measure the impact of adapting potential changes to a process and how any changes would affect your business. You can simulate any part of the process and assess the impact of decisions beforehand.
A series of steps necessary to complete a specific process. The process workflow is the sequence of activities, who is responsible for completing those activities, and what tools they need.
The end-to-end process of acquiring goods and services, from requisition to payment. By analyzing procurement processes, teams can streamline workflows and optimize supplier interactions.
Use it in a sentence: Every procurement department has an important mission: spend wisely to protect the company's spend and margins.
A document issued by a buyer to a supplier. A purchase order (PO) outlines what goods and services the buyer expects from the seller, including a unique PO number and information on quantity, price, and payment and delivery due dates.
The comprehensive process from purchasing goods or services to completion of payment. Purchase-to-pay involves analyzing event logs across procurement, receiving, invoicing, and payment stages to identify inefficiencies, streamline workflows, and enhance financial and operational performance.
RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. RPA software uses ‘robots’ or simply ‘bots’ to perform many of an organization’s repetitive, high-volume tasks without needing human intervention. These tend to be repetitive, rules-based tasks, such as form-filling, standardized reporting, matching POs to invoices and goods receipts, data extraction and insertion, or logging into systems and applications.
Established in the 1980s by Motorola, Six Sigma is a method for identifying and reducing process “defects”.
See: Lean Six Sigma.
Any software platform that generates and stores event logs and transactional data used for process analysis. Examples include ERP, CRM, and financial systems.
Spending that is monitored and optimized through the procurement process. The opposite of spend under management is maverick buying.
Making the process as repeatable as possible, and ensuring that the process as-is matches the process as-designed.
Removing redundant or unnecessary activities from a process.
The network that produces and delivers a product – from raw material suppliers to manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. The supply chain of any business is crucial to its success.
Use it in a sentence: Supply chains are effectively one mega-process made up of lots of connected micro-processes. So a process-first approach is needed to maximize efficiency and improve supply chain performance.
Any software or technology platform that generates and stores event logs related to business processes. Systems, such as ERP or CRM platforms, provide the data needed for analyzing and improving process performance.
Classification of a platform, solution, tools, or methods that can analyze and integrate data from various software systems without being tied to any specific platform. This flexibility allows comprehensive process analysis across diverse systems, ensuring broader insights and improved optimization opportunities.
Use it in a sentence: The Celonis Process Intelligence Graph is system-agnostic and compatible with nearly any software you use - yes, even your ultra-specialized inventory management system or your even older ERP!
The transferring of data and processes from one software platform to another. This transition requires careful mapping of event logs and process data to ensure continuity, minimize disruptions, and maintain accurate process analysis and monitoring during and after the migration.
Use it in a sentence: IT wants to be on-time and on-budget when embarking on a system migration, but that’s challenging when process mapping is manual, fit-gap analysis is subjective, and user adoption is subpar.
Technology that collects and aggregates data from employee desktop tasks and turns it into understandable behavioral patterns.
Use it in a sentence: Parts of your processes take place outside of transactional IT systems, like on a user’s desktop or in email software. Task mining lets you capture these off-system activities to help improve your process understanding.
KPI for the time it takes for cases to proceed from activity A to activity B. Knowing throughput time provides insight into process efficiency, bottlenecks, and areas for potential improvement.
Precise record of the date and time when an event or activity occurs within a process. Timestamps are crucial for reconstructing process flows, analyzing timing patterns, and identifying bottlenecks in the workflow.
The collection of payments without manual, human intervention. This involves using technology like process mining to send invoices, reminders, and process payments.
An automatically generated and processed invoice that requires no manual, human intervention. This streamlined approach uses technology to issue, track, and manage invoices, enhancing accuracy and speeding up payment cycles.
See: Invoice.
A software platform that records and manages daily business transactions, such as ERP or CRM systems. Transactional systems provide the event logs essential for process mining, enabling the analysis and improvement of processes.
Use it in a sentence: Process mining sifts through process data that can be found in all of your various transactional systems, from ERP to CRM to SCM and whatever other acronyms you want to throw its way. Discover more here.
The central place for you to understand the amount of value associated with your process mining initiatives. The Transformation Hub shows the value waiting to be unlocked from the opportunities uncovered by Celonis as well as the value already generated by the Celonis platform.
Use it in a sentence: The Transformation Hub makes it simple to tag, track, and pull opportunities and results to share with anyone, no matter the audience.
The specific path of activities or events that a process follows. A specific set of activities followed by a case is called the case's variant. All different activity combinations that exist for the cases together are the process's variants.
The processes involved in the efficient control and optimization of warehouse operations, including inventory storage, organization, and retrieval. Warehouse management typically looks to ensure accurate order fulfillment, streamlined processes, and effective space utilization.
The financial resources tied up in operational processes, including cash flow, inventory, and receivables. Process mining optimizes working capital by analyzing and improving process efficiency to enhance liquidity and reduce operational costs.