The business of change
Actual (albeit anonymous) tales of change management success
Ch-ch-change is only getting faster
The nature of change has changed. Historically, organizations launched discrete initiatives designed to take them from one state to another. But businesses now seem to be in a constant state of change as they adapt to new environments, market pressures, and technological developments. If only someone could quantify all that change…. Well, someone did. The Accenture Pulse of Change: 2024 Index reveals the pace of change has increased 183% since 2019, and 33% in 2024 alone. P.S. it’s only expected to get faster…
With change accelerating, change management is more important than ever.
So what is change management?
Who better to answer that question than Celonis’ transformation evangelist, Kerry Brown, who has over 25 years’ experience in the change management game?
To guide successful change within an organization, change managers have to orchestrate people, culture, behavior, and performance. Specifically, that means they need to marshal, integrate, and normalize the transformation of organizational components like:
The X factor for effective change
We’ve supported our customers through thousands of change initiatives. And we’ve identified key success factors that drive or support effective change. Take a look:
Drivers
Supporters
Five stories about making change stick
The stories below are real accounts from our team (with a few details hidden to save any blushes). They show how some of the drivers and supporters mentioned above are effective at making change stick
Global CPG brand drives success with executive buy-in during SAP S4/HANA migration
Kerry's kernel: ”Clear expectations and messaging from the C-suite on a process-first strategy fosters frictionless decision-making regarding approach and outcomes.”
Public sector organization overcomes resistance to change with enablement and training
Kerry's kernel: ”No one likes to look dumb. Trying something new can be scary, which makes it easy to procrastinate. Bringing people together in a safe environment to ask questions builds camaraderie and a shared experience in which to learn and grow, without fear of looking silly.
Energy company uses ‘hub and spoke’ CoE to deliver value across disparate business lines
Kerry's kernel: ”‘We are more similar than we are different.’ A universal truth in so many situations is proven true here. Synergies are gained by collecting and connecting like-minded people with complementary responsibilities.”
CPG brand showcases the importance of business ownership in its transition to a process-led culture
Kerry's kernel: ”People don’t hurt what they own.’ A change management truth I learned years ago. Building shared ownership through trusted colleagues is a great way to extend reach and connection to impacted stakeholders.”
Food and beverage giant went back to basics to prioritize most relevant use case
Kerry's kernel: ”Context of business priorities can help maintain focus and ensure that, in a world of limited resources, work remains directed to areas of greatest impact and value. This also minimizes unnecessary change.”
Meet Process Intelligence: the change facilitator
Process Intelligence combines system data, process knowledge and AI to deliver a living, breathing map of your business. It supports change management during every phase of transformation:
Pre-transformation
A digital process twin shows how work really happens and business processes actually run and interact. Clearly identifying change impacts can ensure enablement during transformation. This can also help organizations make the case for change based on the value it will drive.
Mid-transformation
Visualizing processes across functions to see how small changes will impact the business, helps manage business readiness. It provides individuals with a blueprint for new ways of working and an understanding of their role in the change process, as well as the rationale for change. It also enables identification of areas where further support is needed.
Post-transformation
Tracking process adherence allows organizations to see user adoption and understand if new behaviors are being learned and sustained. As value is being realized, clear information is available to show and communicate any and all of the performance impacts.
Change management - keep on discovering
There are some fundamental truths regarding change management. Understanding your scope and stakeholders can shape the success factors most meaningful for you. Don't stop now, check out the below to get change management working for you.
Check out how our customers are acing change management:
Process Intelligence 101
Meet Process Intelligence, the connective tissue of your enterprise.
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Global CPG brand drives success with executive buy-in during SAP S4/HANA migration
A global CPG brand is currently migrating to SAP S4/HANA ahead of the December 2027 deadline. With the business operating globally, this change involves collaboration between internal teams and multiple external partners in different regions – including consultants and technology providers – each with their own methods for driving transformation projects. The company is taking a process-first approach – using Celonis to inform, guide and streamline the migration across all business functions and markets (while also supporting ongoing business operations). So all partners will work with the technology, even if that isn’t their standard approach to transformation initiatives. With so many potentially competing parties involved, there’s a real risk of the migration becoming unmanageable, with friction and finger-pointing between partners and different companies pulling in different directions.
Set swimlanes, make partners stick to them
For any business transformation project to be successful, it needs executive buy-in. For a project of this scale, with so many partners involved, top-down alignment is critical. In this case the C-suite established the process-first approach to the migration and has been instrumental in guiding the transition. Leadership has set guardrails, and clarified roles and responsibilities for each partner to ensure each party remains in its designated swimlane. On one memorable occasion, the president and CFO of a specific region even brought all the key partners and technology vendors together in one meeting to make sure everyone was playing nicely. They explained the company’s goals and vision for the migration, as well as their motivation for using Celonis, clearly setting out the expectations, accountabilities and roles for each team.
Regular meetings, continuous communication
Taking this strong leadership position promotes a culture of collaboration. It means the business, its partners, and its technology providers are all at the table, working in lockstep to keep the transformation project on schedule. Celonis enables this collaboration by supporting partners with their transformation initiatives and ensuring they know how and when to apply the technology. Regular meetings and continuous communication keeps everyone on the same page, and all teams are rolling up their sleeves to ensure the customer is set up for success. By leading from the front, the brand’s most senior leaders are making their expectations clear and setting up the transition for success. Note: written in September 2024
Public sector organization overcomes resistance to change with enablement and training
A public sector organization discovered a significant issue where items were being sourced far outside the boundaries of the procurement process. Celonis was very quickly introduced to the risk assessment and compliance team to improve oversight of the situation and resolve the problem. But the team was not quick to adopt the new technology. They were used to their existing ways of working, which were time-consuming and relied heavily on spreadsheets. They were concerned the technology would make their jobs more complex or – when it came to automation – even replace them. Uncertainty towards the technology made the team unwilling to find out how it could help them.
Hands-on training turned things around
Two months after implementation, with limited progress, a full-day, in-person training session was organized. Despite the post-COVID challenge of gathering everyone in the office, the team leader recognized that face-to-face interaction was key to success. The day started with the team sitting around the room, arms crossed, with little affection shown for the technology. But by the end of the day, all were ready and willing to attempt this new way of working. Prioritizing empathy, the facilitator really listened to and addressed the team’s concerns about using Celonis, as well as exploring how it could be beneficial to them. There were hands-on-keyboard exercises using the organization's own systems and data, with team members tasked to use the technology to find out key pieces of information and report back to the group. Gradually the attitude of the team shifted as people got comfortable with the tool, asked questions, and really understood both its power and simplicity.
Animosity turned into advocacy
Of course change doesn’t really happen in eight hours. But within two to three weeks, there was a massive improvement in usage, with the team even giving feedback on how the tool could be improved or adapted for their specific use case. One year on, they are now checking purchase orders every 15 minutes and eliminating non-compliant procurement behaviors. They've embraced the technology, to reduce costs within the vendor and procurement communities. The organization is now testing AI capabilities, and some team members have become advocates for Celonis, sharing their success stories at industry events.
Energy company uses ‘hub and spoke’ CoE to deliver value across disparate business lines
An energy company was using Celonis to unlock value in a variety of processes within different functions like supply chain, shared services, and upstream operations. Although the company had a Center of Excellence (CoE), with enthusiastic individuals that had experienced the power of the technology, there wasn’t a unified approach to using Celonis across the organization, supported by a cross-departmental leadership council. This was partly because the company’s various functions operate relatively independently, and they weren’t always prepared to engage with a centralized CoE.
Find the people who can connect the business
With excitement around Celonis growing, and proven success in individual functions, the company’s leadership decided to move to an enterprise-wide programme. This required a CoE rethink, resulting in a new hub-and-spoke model being applied. Within the enterprise hub of the CoE there's a group of people that are well-versed in the Celonis methodology. They are perfectly placed to market, solution, and deploy the technology across the business – connecting and coordinating as necessary to realize cross-function efficiencies and enforce best practices for platform usage and operationalization. But there are also individuals (or spokes) within the different business functions that act as specialist CoE leads. They champion the technology within their function, own the strategic focus for that function, and help to manage change. The real power of these functional CoE leads is that they come from the business and they’ve felt the pain of the process breakdowns within the different functions. They are aligned with the strategic focus of their leadership as well as any constraints and ongoing initiatives that would influence where Celonis is best leveraged. Through these specialists, Celonis can be plugged into specific business challenges to make change happen.
Operate and optimize as one
One of the biggest impacts of this hub-and-spoke style CoE was breaking down silos and getting people in different business functions and departments to talk to one another in a way that never happened before. Increasing transparency into how processes run across the organization was a major step towards operating and optimizing as one enterprise, improving relationships that were traditionally fractious. It ensured improvements in one function did not come at the detriment of another. The various business functions will always operate somewhat independently. But with this new approach they can now do so with a shared understanding of how they impact the enterprise as a whole. Supply chain, for instance, can see how any actions they take to drive down shipping costs may impact material availability for critical maintenance of upstream assets. Rather than simply focusing on wins for their individual spoke, business functions can make decisions that benefit the entire enterprise.
CPG firm showcases the importance of business ownership in transition to a process-led culture.
A global confectionery brand is beginning a five-year transformation journey to become a process-led company. The goal is operational excellence, achieved by completely re-imagining the way the company operates across people, processes, and technology. With four business units, the company is taking a phased approach, starting with one unit and then expanding to the rest so lessons can be learned and applied along the way.
Global process owners assemble!
All this transformation will have a major impact on employees and the way they are expected to work. To ease the transition, around 30 high-performing employees have been identified in the initial business unit, and assigned the role of global process owners. They are currently being trained – with Celonis support – learning what their end-to-end process looks like, how the business is operating today, and where the opportunities for improvement are located. Each process owner will have dedicated technical support, as well as a team that reports into them. They will be responsible for delivering value from their core business process. By ensuring that business users are fully enabled, and that they own value delivery, the company is creating champions and allies for the transformation project.
Creating a learning community
In addition to assigning process owners, the company is also standing up a variety of initiatives to create active champions within the business and drive ownership of value realization. These include a Celopeer community of core Celonis users that meet for training on a regular basis, as well as monthly ‘lunch and learns.’ Major transformation projects have a significant impact on people, working practices and company culture. Starting early with training and assigning business ownership before go-live can reduce the impact of the change further down the line. Note: written in September 2024
Food and beverage giant went back to basics to prioritize most relevant use cases
The good news: this business was realizing value from Celonis in a variety of processes and it had an established CoE with a core team of data engineers. The less good news: the changes and improvements driven by the CoE weren’t always fully aligned with the strategic objectives of the business. As Celonis use increased, the CoE had moved from a push model of proactively identifying new opportunities, to a pull model where it was responding to ad hoc requests. Individual teams heard co-workers’ Celonis success stories and were asking to use the technology to automate manual tasks and fix broken processes. While these changes had positive outcomes, they weren’t necessarily aligned with overall business strategy. This situation was exacerbated by rapid turnover in CoE leadership, which meant incoming requests to use Celonis weren’t always being reviewed at a high level or prioritized by strategic importance.
Getting off the mark with a value sprint
With Celonis support, the company went back to basics and took part in a value sprint to identify, prioritize, and implement the changes that would deliver the greatest strategic value. A value sprint is a structured programme used by the Celonis value engineering team to analyze an entire process, identify and validate strategic use cases, and target those use cases to realize value. In this case, the value sprint was a three-month project focussed on the Procure-to-Pay (P2P) process. It had a dedicated team spanning both Celonis and the business. The project started with a discovery workshop to explore the business’s strategic focus and the KPIs it wanted to improve. Having built out and validated the data, the team identified 18 use cases, and prioritized them according to potential value and feasibility. Then stakeholders chose the two they felt would be most impactful to the organization.
Reinvigorating the long-term vision
Celonis implemented and embedded those two use cases and handed them off to the business, ensuring users had the appropriate training and resources. While one used a bespoke solution, the other use case leveraged an out-of-the-box Celonis application – adapted to the specifics of the business and its source systems. This use case alone realized almost $20 million in value in just three months. After the initial use case success, the CoE started work on other opportunities identified during the value sprint. Overall, the project has given the CoE a more structured approach to identifying and prioritizing use cases that are aligned with business goals – setting them up for strategic success.
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