Your guide to success with Celonis

At this stage, there are two people that are essential to your success: an executive sponsor, and a Celonis lead — which is probably you, if you’re taking the time to read this.

Your executive sponsor will be the person who keeps the team accountable and drives the KPIs. The Celonis lead will be the person who actually drives the implementation.

Both are non-negotiable, trust us. We’ve seen a lot of implementations, and the ones that win (and win fast) have both of these.

But don’t worry, the weight of the implementation doesn’t sit solely on their shoulders. Now’s the perfect time to engage our ecosystem of partners.

Start small, start specific.

We have a group of what we call ‘core processes’ that almost every company in the world has, where there is almost always value hiding.

For most people, you should probably start with one or two of these core processes:

Accounts Payable
Accounts Receivable
Inventory Management
Order Management
Procurement

If those processes aren’t core for you because of the industry you work in, it’s worth taking a look at our Industries pages.

There you’ll find things like Credit Management for Banking, Claims Management for Insurance, and much more.

The foundation for everything you’ll do with Celonis is the Process Intelligence Graph.

To help you quickly find the low-hanging fruit in the core processes, we’ve created a number of out-of-the-box apps.

So if you want to do something like check if you’re paying invoices twice (you’d be surprised how common it is), there’s an app for that. It’s called Duplicate Invoice Checker, and it’s one of our AI-enabled apps.

Want to check out all the apps we have available?

Visit the Marketplace

Want to know more about how we’re using AI?

Check out our AI page

Now that you’ve got the ball rolling, you’re going to want to create a Center of Excellence.

This will serve a dual function of education and evangelism internally at your company.

At this stage, change management is going to be the biggest hurdle to your success.

Which means having a CoE that can help get people on board is going to be your biggest driver of success.

You’ve got a couple of core processes under your belt, and you’re going to want to expand your reach.

What we typically advise is to keep within the core processes and expand to three to five processes.

This will mean that you’ll be able to start tackling end-to-end processes like Procure-to-Pay or Order-to-Cash, and start seeing some real game-changing value.

By now, your needs will probably have outgrown what you can achieve with the apps alone, and you’re going to be looking into more custom solutions.

Plus, here’s where things get exciting because you fold things like Task Mining into the mix.

Not only are you finding value in processes, you’re seeing how everything fits together, and starting to find value across and between processes too.

By this stage you will hopefully have hundreds, if not thousands of people at your organization across different functions and departments using Celonis, all driving value.

If you’re at an early stage and reading ahead to see where you’ll end up this might sound fanciful, but trust us, it happens.

As you’d imagine, this is going to be too much for a single centralized CoE to be in charge of. What we typically see working well for companies at this stage is a ‘hub and spoke’ system, where they have satellite CoEs, each driving change and delivering value.

Once you’ve got here, you’re looking at every type of process, and even possibly the links between every process.

So you’re expanding beyond core processes to things like logistics, HR, accounting and customer support.

It even means you can tackle something like Customer Lifecycle Management, because for the first time you’re able to see every process across the entire customer lifecycle.

As you can probably imagine, this is where the use of Celonis technology becomes pretty advanced.

You can start to create custom machine learning models based on your data with the ML Workbench, and even use the Intelligence API to feed the learnings you’ve found in Celonis into other tools.

It can connect to any IT system, productivity tool or digital application you want it to - for example, you might use it to augment your Salesforce opportunity data so you can access the next best actions to progress an opportunity.