Celonis Process Mining

Main articles:

• Process Mining
• Business Process Management

Process Mining from Celonis is a versatile and cross-industry platform.

Process Mining technology can be used by a wide range of customers, since in addition to controlling and optimizing business processes with industry-specific characteristics (banking, retail, manufacturing), it is applicable to supporting processes occurring in any large organizations: purchasing, sales, receivables and payables management, etc. The technology shows the best result in a situation where the process to be analyzed and further optimized is of a mass nature - more than 200-300 thousand versions per year, for example, purchases made or orders executed.

Celonis products allow companies to not only understand the real picture of process execution, identify a large number of bottlenecks and inefficiencies. They implement the concept of Enterprise Management System - the ability to continuously track business processes, identify undesirable situations based on clear conditions and using artificial intelligence. At the same time, it is possible to notify business users about the occurrence of undesirable situations with the provision of "what to do" recommendations, including the complete automation of corrective actions through integration with existing company information systems.

2020: Jump to a new level of profitability in retail?
Yes, this is possible - using Process Mining by Celonis technology

According to the National Rating Agency, the operating profitability of grocery retail is on average about 3%. Operating profitability is a financial ratio that shows how much profit a company makes on a ruble of sales after paying variable costs, but before taxes. Therefore, investors and creditors pay special attention to it: the higher this ratio, the more effective the company.

To improve operating profitability, the company needs to either increase revenue while maintaining the same level of operating costs, or reduce variable costs.

Competition in retail is now very high. According to the new-retail.ru portal, in large cities, federal networks of hypermarkets and discounters occupy up to 80% of the market. Therefore, increasing revenue by attracting new buyers is becoming more difficult and more expensive. However, using proven digital solutions to optimize business processes, you can influence the company's internal performance factors and achieve lower costs - thus improving the company's operational profitability and attractiveness to investors.

To increase operating profitability, the retailer needs to either increase revenue while maintaining the same level of operating costs, or reduce variable costs

The era of automation 15 years ago opened the business to the capabilities of BPM-class systems designed to show how processes should work in accordance with the current structure and regulations of the company. You can describe the desired process, and then, by polling, compare it with how it really works. This approach is effective when the company is focused on formalizing and standardizing procedures - most often at the initial stage of its development. Process Mining by Celonis technology is a radical new approach to business process analysis, focused on identifying inefficiencies and reducing financial losses in real time. Experienced users of this technology call it a mathematical, scientific approach to assessing and increasing the efficiency of processes.

This is primarily due to the fact that Celonis analyzes data on real business processes and how they actually proceed, based on quantitative indicators of the time of execution of operations and digital data on user actions (creating and modifying documents, performing actions that leave digital traces). This information is available in Celonis through real-time integration with transactional systems (SAP, 1C, Oracle, and any others).

Thus, the stage of formalization of processes and their validation becomes automated and more objective: those zones are identified for improvements that cannot be found "with the naked Celonis platform with the eye."

Celonis practice shows that when choosing a partner for implementation, identifying areas for improvement and developing recommendations, deep expertise in various business processes is important, because only if you have the appropriate knowledge and many years of experience in analysis and optimization, it is possible:
• Quickly and accurately identify zones with process improvement potential
• propose and validate hypotheses of root causes of inefficiencies;
• Develop an optimal plan for business-driven improvements.

Celonis Process Mining as a tool to reduce operating costs in retail

Costs associated with deliveries and distributions

The time and cost of executing logistics operations depend on many variables in the actions of people who can make both individual and system errors, for example: regularly delay shipments; bring the wrong goods; correct errors in documents manually many times instead of eliminating them once in NSI; Do not optimally manage logistics and inventory Forgive regular mistakes to suppliers.

One global retailer, investigating P2P and O2C processes, identified several major inefficiencies leading to high process costs, namely:
• Products that were already reserved in the shopping cart through click-and-reserve continued to be available for ordering. This was one of the main reasons for the problems with inventory and cancellation of orders;
• Many online orders were made using goods taken directly from stores. These goods were taken back to the logistics center before being shipped to the customer, thus delaying delivery.

After visualizing the process, carefully analyzing root problems with Celonis and confirming solutions with the business, the company developed an action plan to correct the situation:

1. Establish a clear distinction between online orders and products declared through click-and-reserve in all systems;

2. Increase logistics center inventory according to demand to avoid using store inventory for online orders.

As a result, it was possible to increase the efficiency of online sales and achieve the following KPIs:
• 99.9% delivery SLAs on time and exactly;
• Reduce the number of order waivers by 20%
• Optimize the shipping process for 50% of products delivered from stores.

Costs related to financial management

One of the advantages of Celonis as an industrial platform is a large amount of pre-built content, which allows you to get benefits in a very short time after implementation. For example, once Celonis is connected, you can use ready-made automated monitoring scenarios in finance and treasury: duplicate payments, making payments in the optimal period (using discounts or the best exchange rate), eliminating "random" purchases, ensuring correspondence between the invoice and the order, analyzing invoice flow blocks, monitoring internal procedures, and others.

The large retail chain managed to optimize working capital by $7 million with the help of Celonis by reducing the number of untimely deliveries from 500 counterparties leading to early payments. At the same time, the potential for automation of manual labor in interaction with suppliers in 30% of operations was revealed, as a result, the execution time of the P2P process was reduced by 50%.

The financial sector deals with a significant amount of information distributed across a large number of documents in different systems, which directly affects the speed and effectiveness of identifying risks and errors. With more than 2,000 Celonis implementations, the number of manual changes in some documents reaches 99%, and on average each document is adjusted about 3 times per process. Most of these changes can be avoided using Process Mining.

Customer Relationship Management Costs

Customer relationship management is a continuous process that should ideally anticipate consumer desires, thus retaining the customer and increasing their loyalty. Therefore, the three most popular Celonis use cases for retail are:
• visualization of the entire customer's' path 'and analysis of how each individual event or action affects the conversion: this allows you to evaluate which campaigns, promotions or personalized content are effective, and which ones are not, find factors that block or reduce revenue from the client and change them;
• Improving the accuracy of demand forecasting: forecasting the volume of purchase orders, the volume of customer orders in the sales process, the necessary resources in logistics centers for efficient and timely processing of orders;
• Increasing the efficiency of contact centers, self-service portal, customer service: reducing the cost and time to process complaints or tickets from customers, optimizing payment approval (automatic payment approval if the cost of the problem resolution process exceeds the amount of payments), using machine training to identify similar requests and automating their processing, optimal planning and allocation of resources in client service services.

Product and Service Management Costs

In the context of the rapid technological development of retail, companies have to do a lot from scratch and be the first: to develop their own brands and establish production, test and launch new services that distinguish them from competitors. Of course, it is impossible to make the product optimal in terms of costs from the first time. Therefore, real-time analysis of inefficiencies becomes an integral part of cost control. After all, preventing a problem is always cheaper than correcting its consequences.

Here are some of the KPIs that may be affected by people's suboptimal actions: product or service time to market, correct price mix, average transaction cost, ROI, revenue per square meter of store space, employee availability, real estate costs.

If you want to increase the efficiency of business process management with Process Mining by Celonis and thus provide your company with a long-term competitive advantage, you can contact one of Celonis partners in Russia - Novardis.

2019: Introduction of a module for detecting deviation in business processes

One of the key updates was the Action Engine, which allows you to quickly identify deviations in business processes and provide recommendations for their elimination. Operation with detected deviations is automated on the basis of Workflows module, which provides the possibility of execution of multistage control actions and notifications about deviations in operation of BP using integration technologies, RPA, Skype, email and others. Celonis experts also talked about a new technology for integrating machine learning algorithms into business process analysis and control based on the Machine Learning Workbench module.

2018: Celonis Process Mining Features

(data are current as of April 2018)

• control of deviations from regulations and compliance with standards
• lower costs and higher sales conversions
• reduction of labor costs and process execution time
• real-time data analysis and support for organizational change implementation

Improving Business Process Efficiency: Application Areas

• Alignment of processes of different companies within mergers and acquisitions
• Planning and controlling the adaptation of processes to the new product line
• Planning and monitoring process migration as part of IT infrastructure upgrades

• Purchasing, sales and distribution
• Cash flow management, mutual settlements
• Logistics
• IT Service Management
• Document flow

• Mass operations
• Production operations
• Customer Life Cycle
• Analysis of user routes on the site
• Career management and training
• M&R