Advances in business process mining enable a digital twin of the organization

Celonis, a leader in process mining technology, has announced several significant improvements to its process mining capabilities. The most important step forward is helping organizations analyze multiple processes at once to create a digital twin of the organization (DTO).

While other process mining vendors (and Gartner) have used the term DTO in the past, previous approaches have been patchy, analyzing each process individually. Celonis CEO Alex Rinke told VentureBeat that with Process Sphere, several technical improvements have improved the analysis performance of process mining more than 100 times, enabling multi-object analysis.

This can simplify the experience for business users who are not process experts, reduce the complexity of analyzing multiple processes, and help the user identify how processes affect each other.

Here are the main new announcements:

• Process atmosphere analyzes multiple connected processes to drive a digital twin of the organization.
• Business Miner combines process and business intelligence into simplified experiences for business users.
• Debtor apps help companies fight inflation.
• Emporix Partnership improves process execution at business partners.

Process Sphere takes process mining to the third dimension

Celonis’s The biggest news is the debut of Process Sphere, which helps analyze multiple processes from the perspective of different types of users. For example, a particular business process, such as quote-to-cash or order-to-pay, may include multiple apps for enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM).

The new Process Sphere capabilities provide a 3D perspective on how processes affect each other, much like an MRI analyzes your body from multiple angles to paint a three-dimensional picture. Rinke explains: “Companies don’t have just one process. They have many processes that interact with each other, all of which are important to improve performance. You need 3D understanding to drive deeper optimization.”

Multi-object process mining can help tell apart how events relate to each other and to different objects. For example, shipping a bicycle relies on other processes to ensure that individual components such as brakes are in stock so that the bicycle can be manufactured and shipped on time.

Process mining performs complex analysis across millions of records to correlate log data in ERP, CRM, and SCM systems with a sequence of events in a process. Rinke said that by optimizing the performance of these algorithms more than 100 times in recent years, Celonis has come much closer to a true DTO.

“With a digital twin of the organization, we can look at how all processes in a company can interact simultaneously,” he says.

Various business users, such as accountants, product managers, and supply chain experts, can explore the complex relationships between business objects such as orders, requisitions, invoices, and shipments. This can provide insight into bottlenecks in specific processes and identify how small delays in one process can have a bigger impact on other parts of the organization.

Simplifying the user experience

A digital twin of an organization is much more abstract than a digital twin of physical things like buildings or cars. Processes are traditionally presented and explored through complex spaghetti diagrams showing the different steps and alternative paths of each process. Process Sphere improves upon this with color-coded lines that look more like a subway map.

But this is still a bit too complex for users who may not be familiar with process analysis. Therefore, Celonis developed Business Miner as a more simplified approach to present business process insights in the context of a company’s current challenges.

“The idea with Business Miner was to create an experience that is extremely user-friendly,” explains Rinke. “[Even if] business users don’t even know what a process is… they can still save millions of dollars.” Business users can analyze the way workflows between ERP, SCM and CRM systems to identify opportunities for improvement or cost reduction.

For example, a bookkeeper may examine factors that affect the percentage of on-time payments; assess the specific value of increasing the rate; and receive guidance on actionable steps to do so. The tools also allow users to weave charts, graphs, and recommendations into consolidated reports and action lists that they can share with other team members.

New apps for debtors, e-commerce

Celonis also combines these improvements with its execution management expertise and builds low-code applications to support various domain-specific applications. For example, a new line of accounts receivable apps helps companies increase their working capital and reduce the costs of collection management, accounts receivable management and dispute management.

Guided experiences for debtors

These new apps combine information about the processes with the data that flows through them. Businesses can bring together customer, balance and contract data from transactional and analytical systems. This can help debtor teams identify, prioritize and execute the most impactful actions. It can also help streamline and automate collections, disputes, and credit processes.

“The whole idea is that we can come up and provide value through guided experiences,” explains Rinke.

Partnering with Emporix to Optimize Ecommerce Customization

Celonis has also partnered with Emporix on the Commerce Execution Platform to automatically optimize e-commerce processes that impact business partners. This helps enterprises automatically align workflows with changes in customer demand, inventory, or supplier and fulfillment status.

Traditional B2B commerce systems typically require manual intervention to adapt to changes in pricing, inventory, or customer behavior. The new tool allows companies to monitor and customize their interactions with end customers using process intelligence signals. For example, if the system determines that a shipment is likely to be late, it can recommend an alternative.

“I think this will redefine the future of business apps,” Rinke said. “If you have this cross-process understanding and intelligence, you can make things much better. It applies to the front office, back office and supply chain. This changes the way you manage and optimize the performance of your business. It becomes a performance layer on top of your applications and business processes.”