Celonis customer Lufthansa CityLine crowned the winner for ‘Data Powered Business’ in IDC European Data Strategy & Innovation Awards 2020

IDC recognizes transformational power of Celonis for improving Lufthansa CityLine’s flight punctuality by 300.000 minutes

Celonis, the market leader in AI-enhanced Process Mining and Process Excellence software, today proudly announces that its customer Lufthansa Cityline has been recognized as the winner in the ‘Data Powered Business’ category in IDC’s first annual European Data Strategy & Innovation Awards 2020. Lufthansa CityLine, a fully-owned subsidiary of Germany’s Lufthansa, one of the world’s leading airline groups, specializes in hub feeder services into Lufthansa’s global route network. The carrier was recognized for its transformational work using Celonis technology, which enabled them to operate 300.000 minutes more punctually and reduced delays in maintenance work by 15%.

IDC selected Lufthansa CityLine’s deployment for demonstrating the power of Celonis’ business process optimization software to align, optimize and transform how the world’s most successful organizations operate. With Celonis, Lufthansa Cityline has harnessed the power of AI to both identify process bottlenecks or sub-optimal performance and to enhance those processes by remodeling them to overcome limitations that are holding back improvements. The solution also continually monitors process conformity to ensure business benefits continue to flow and to create new opportunities for constant improvement.

Unlike conventional, manual process optimization techniques, Lufthansa CityLine has leveraged AI-enabled process mining to automatically identify and model complex business processes within its existing digital footprint, including Enterprise Resource Planning solutions. Process mining is much faster and more cost-effective than conventional workshops and extended consultancy engagements. It also provides data-driven evidence to understand the root causes of process deviations and inefficiency and to enhance processes with AI-powered intelligent recommendations for process and business outcome optimization.

To ensure Lufthansa continuously captures the value from the insights provided by Celonis, the airline introduced the strategic initiative PROMOTE - PROcess Mining for OperaTional Excellence in 2018. With PROMOTE, Lufthansa CityLine moved from reactive process improvement to an integrated, continuous improvement approach, called “digitized lean”, leveraging Celonis to identify new potential areas for improvement, plus root causes of organizational problems. Alongside agile methodologies and a new, non-hierarchical teamwork culture, the approach is the spearhead for greater operational excellence.

Lufthansa CityLine has applied the Celonis solution to multiple interconnected operations processes. Starting with Technical Fleet Management – the process of aircraft maintenance – Lufthansa CityLine was able to reduce delays in maintenance work by 15%. In Ground Operations, the airline has improved its flight punctuality by 300.000 minutes after analyzing and optimizing a complex set of activities managed by multiple service providers.

Transforming Lufthansa CityLine’s performance with process mining

Lufthansa CityLine called on Celonis after identifying certain challenges related to its flight operations. Specifically, the airline wanted to boost flight punctuality and reduce the negative impact that delays were having on customer satisfaction. Rather than hiring process consultants to examine the issue, it turned to Celonis to discover, enhance and monitor data-based processes, based on extracting event logs available in the organization’s existing IT systems. Neil Ward-Dutton, VP of European AI and Automation Practices at IDC, said: “IDC selected Lufthansa CityLine as winner because its PROMOTE initiative really stood out as an enormous success story, with clear, valuable business outcomes. The collaboration between Lufthansa CityLine and Celonis clearly demonstrates the power of process mining to transform organizational performance using automated tools and agile implementation methods.”

Miguel Milano, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Owner at Celonis, commented: “All organizations right now are asking themselves how to re-imagine the way they work – for resilience, for efficiency, for sustainability and for customer satisfaction improvement. However, until you really know how you currently operate, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence, then any improvement program is a hit and miss process.

“As IDC recognizes with this award, our work with Lufthansa CityLine proves Celonis provides the data-driven evidence, the AI-powered recommendations and the constant monitoring for process optimization. Both the potential improvements and paybacks achievable with Celonis are what is driving our success in transforming customers’ performance.”

Celonis’ AI enables Lufthansa CityLine to understand process flows, inefficiencies and bottlenecks

Lufthansa CityLine prioritized Technical Fleet Management in its initial engagement with Celonis, due to the high material costs, such as aircraft engines, the strict regulatory requirements involved, and its significant impact on flight operations and ultimately customer satisfaction. Celonis enabled Lufthansa CityLine to better understand process flows, inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the maintenance of its aircraft, including planning and material supply. Prior to working with Celonis, Lufthansa CityLine had little formal insight into this complexity.

For Ground Operations, Lufthansa CityLine leveraged Celonis to visualize many key processes that impact overall punctuality ratings. The staggering complexity involves a variety of concurrent activities including loading, fueling and catering, delivered by a wide range of independent service providers. Each step must run smoothly and on time, since minor delays within the process flow of the first flight of the day (FFOD) can have a domino effect resulting in massive delays by the end of the day.

After its initial work with Celonis, Lufthansa CityLine improved its flight punctuality by 300.000 minutes, meaning that the overall customer experience of approximately 8 million passengers that departed with Lufthansa CityLine in 2019 was significantly increased. The airline can now analyze the time needed for aircraft turnarounds, factoring in circumstances such as the season, time of day and type of aircraft. This enables more accurate forecasting and means Lufthansa CityLine can avoid irregularity costs resulting for example from the activation of additional resources, rebooking of passengers, hotel bookings for missed connecting flights by anticipating when planes will take longer to service. As a next step, Lufthansa CityLine plans to leverage AI to connect new processes to Celonis – using real-time event logs based on AI-generated handling activities at the airport gate to send automatic signals proactively to employees who control aircraft handling.

About IDC’s European Data Strategy and Innovation Awards

IDC's European Data Strategy and Innovation Awards are focused on celebrating the European organizations that are blazing trails in this area, and on improving awareness of "what works." The awards recognize excellence in European organizations' strategic consideration and management of data, and use of data, analytics, and AI to drive innovation, new products and services, and operational excellence.

About Celonis

Celonis, the market leader in AI-enhanced Process Mining and Process Excellence software, transforms data into insight and action. Its Intelligent Business Cloud allows organizations to rapidly understand and improve the operational backbone of their businesses. Companies around the world including Siemens, 3M, Airbus and Vodafone rely on Celonis to guide action and drive change to business processes, resulting in millions of dollars of cost savings and improved customer experiences. The company is based in Munich and New York.