Symbio meets Celonis: Unlock next-level Process Intelligence with process modeling and process mining

In November 2023 Celonis acquired Symbio to combine leading Process Intelligence with institutional knowledge about how your business operates in one single platform. Here’s a breakdown of why Business Process Management and process mining go so well together, and how combining them helps you bring Process Intelligence to every employee in your company. 

Why should you combine Business Process Management and process mining?

There are countless blog posts out there that will sing the praises of both Business Process Management (BPM) and process mining, individually. But here’s the deal: combining both technologies unlocks a completely new set of possibilities.

Traditionally, BPM focuses on process modeling. There are multiple forms that the modeling could take, such as a BPMN process model, an overarching process landscape with process groupings and the sub-processes within them, a customer journey map, or even an org chart. 

These models are used as part of ongoing business transformation and process excellence efforts.  They serve as a starting point to help understand current processes, which can help your teams understand what needs to change and thus conceptualize (and model) the future ideal-state process. 

Plus, those models can include details about legal requirements, company policy, and stakeholders. Additionally, BPM process models can be created on different hierarchical levels, allowing for documentation of top-level company strategy and how it maps to low-level activities, effectively linking strategy to execution.

But those models can’t tell you what your processes currently look like in the real world.

On the other hand, process mining is fantastic at telling you how your processes currently run, where there are bottlenecks, and which root causes you should tackle to improve them. In short: process mining is a great tool for measuring your performance and comparing it to targets. But process mining struggles to say what the ideal future should look like.

The best of both worlds

So: process mining is perfect for developing an objective starting baseline of how your processes operate today, while process modeling is useful for designing an ideal future-state process.

Bring these technologies together, and you get a new level of end-to-end transparency, and a clear roadmap to reach your targets.

Adding AI to the mix to unlock next-level Process Intelligence

So now it’s clear why BPM and process mining go well together. But what makes Celonis and Symbio a perfect match?

First, a shared mindset. Both are recognized by the leading analysts as innovation leaders with a strong focus on both cutting-edge technology and user experience. And both are embracing the changes that AI brings to BPM. Symbio created the first BPM software driven by AI, based on a single, standardized database to reduce admin effort and cost of ownership. In a similar vein, Celonis uses GenAI to bring Process Intelligence to every user, plus the unique object-centric approach to process mining, allowing you to drill into the relationships between processes and departments for a deeper understanding of upstream and downstream dependencies.

Second is the deep expertise within our respective fields.  Symbio's process designs and documents contain institutional knowledge about why processes run the way they do, such as the steps, procedures, risks and people involved in onboarding a new supplier. Combining the vast amount of process information in these models with Celonis' extensive process knowledge unlocks a new level of process intelligence.

This means we can now deliver a single solution that unites process modeling, process mining, automation, and execution capabilities – across all your processes and systems.

Drive end-to-end process improvement with one platform

In the Celonis platform you have all the tools of process excellence at your fingertips – plus actionable insights that are ready to share with your whole organization. Take a peek at the features:

•  The Process Navigator

  • Our Process Navigator becomes the single source of operational truth for every employee, providing personalized access to all the information relevant to them to understand the context within the wider organization. 

  • This enables your employees to quickly find process-relevant connections, goals, resources, and team members and provides real-time process support powered by AI. 

  • Plus, you can enhance and annotate your process models with live transaction insights to deliver full transparency in real-time.

•  Process Designer

  • The Process Designer allows you to build an enterprise map of your current and target state, in a common view that can be shared between your business and IT – from business processes to customer journeys, enterprise architecture, and org structure. 

  • It makes it easier to build target models, supporting you with suggestions made by generative AI that factors in context on how your business operates.

  • You can easily compare as-is and target processes by overlaying your process-mining analysis onto your target state models to identify gaps and test and validate changes.

  • And you can keep your stakeholders informed with detailed insights, created at the push of a button.

Take your organization to the next level of Process Intelligence

We have a proven track record of successfully and painlessly migrating customers into our Process Designer and Process Navigator. Are you ready to join them?

Check out our "Process Management and Modelling with Celonis" webinar and get to know more about our mine-first, model-second approach to process improvement.

Reach out to us to learn more about how Celonis can support your business across all areas of Process Excellence.

Katharina Laumann

Content Marketing Manager

Katharina Laumann is a Content Marketing Manager for Celonis and has been writing about process mining since 2018.