Process intelligence that improves key supply chain, distribution, product, finance and customer operations has brought enormous, lasting business value to organizations across the globe. BMW, Allianz, GE Healthcare, The State of Oklahoma and others of all sizes across all industries have optimized business performance, freed up billions in cash savings and reduced their carbon footprint by using state-of-the art technology to mine, model, orchestrate and optimize just a single process or system.
Now, leading-edge organizations are starting to recognize that improved efficiency, resilience, agility, digital transformation and other benefits can be significantly amplified by collaborating with business partners and extending process intelligence beyond their company walls.
A peek at the process intelligence frontier
Want a glimpse at the frontier of high-value enterprise process ontelligence?
- Three of Europe’s top electronics suppliers are streamlining operations by building transparency between their shared Order Management and Procurement process.
- Process intelligence is letting an NGO and researchers analyze previously siloed data from the juvenile justice and mental health systems in a large U.S. state, providing systemic insights that can improve outcomes for at-risk youth and families.
- A pre-built AI Collaboration Agent, powered by Rollio, uses a natural language interface to help humans resolve process exceptions through better cross-organizational decision-making.
In different ways, each example reaches beyond organizational and company boundaries and a handful of in-house experts and into profitable collaboration with business partners and a larger population of everyday users.
Cross-company collaboration amplifies value for all
Integrating and democratizing value across networks is a logical evolution, says Eugenio Cassiano, SVP of strategy and innovation at Celonis. Headquartered in Munich and New York, the private firm (valued at $13 billion) is a pioneer and global leader in Process intelligence that counts more than 30% of the Fortune Global 500 companies as customers. Collaborating on processes can produce many shared benefits and boost the “top, bottom and green lines” of companies, business partners and industries, Cassiano says.
But there’s a big catch. Processes have become multi-layered and extremely complex, explains Cassiano. Today, no single company — including Celonis — can possess all the technological and industry knowledge needed to profitably extend process improvements to diverse partners. Success requires working with and across partner ecosystems to create deep and lasting value.
“Scale is not just scaling with your own people,” he explains. “It doesn’t just take a village – it takes an ecosystem.”
“Co-innovators” are key to process expansion
In this ever-changing environment, Celonis believes the smartest way to meet the challenge is by empowering a worldwide community of partners to “co-innovate” process improvements. Involving customers, consultants, developers, integrators and others has long been foundational to the company’s ambitious mission to “make processes work for the people, companies and the planet.”
In the last year, this community (which Celonis calls “ change makers”) has significantly expanded, with 150 new partners starting 1,300 new projects. During the same period, 65,000 students have trained at more than 700 Celonis partner alliance universities. They’ll become the next generation of process leaders, with an inside track to the new career paths and opportunities in process intelligence fueled by the ongoing AI boom.
Advanced tech expands process development and use
In addition, it is important to equip community partners with state-of-the-art technologies and tools.
From its start, Cassiano notes, Celonis has championed and developed open, vendor-agnostic platforms and products that work with the likes of Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and hundreds of other enterprise vendors of ERP, CRM and core business systems.
At Celosphere, its annual user event held this fall, the company introduced a host of new offerings and enhancements designed to make it easier for various partners to develop, co-develop and use process optimizations within and across company boundaries, including:
- Celonis Data Core: Called Celocore for short, it helps customers get data into Celonis more easily and once it’s there, enables them to perform transforms, loads and queries more quickly. The company said Celocore delivers up to 20x performance versus the competition.
- New GenAI-powered user experience: This simplifies data ingestion and dashboard building through GenAI-powered assistants.
- New use-case-specific apps: These applications combine partners’ industry and domain expertise with Celonis’ app-building best practices and the latest platform capabilities.
- Celonis AgentC: This suite of tools, integrations and partnerships enables the company’s community to develop AI agents in the leading AI agent platforms, like Microsoft Copilot Studio, IBM watsonx Orchestrate and Amazon Bedrock Agents. It also allows them to use AI agents pre-built by partners. One early user, Campari Group, the legendary spirits maker, will use the Celonis Process Collaboration Agent, powered by Rollio to speed up removal of credit blocks for sales orders. Cosentino, a leading manufacturer of design and architectural surfaces, is also using a Celonis AI assistant to analyze blocked sales orders, enabling credit managers to process up to 5x more orders per day.
- Celonis Networks: A new offering, announced in beta, that is designed to extend the process intelligence beyond company walls by connecting organizations.
Speaking about Networks, Cassiano said: “Celonis provides a platform for companies and industries to come together, share information, coordinate activities and co-create solutions to tackle complex problems that no single entity could solve on its own, and turn intelligence into business value.”
Network capabilities help partners solve complex problems in several keyways:
- Common taxonomy and language reduce time, effort and friction in communicating and collaborating across companies and industries.
- Federated data sharing gives contributors a holistic view of problems and insights unavailable in a single organization.
- Process orchestration enables coordinated workflows and activities across organizations.
While most cross-organizational projects and partner-developed apps are in early stages, initial results are noteworthy.
Electronics partners streamline procurement
Despite using EDI technology, Conrad Electronic, a 100-year-old family business and its European suppliers, Schukat Electronic and TD SYNNEX, struggled with outdated pricing, delivery discrepancies and various data mismatches.
Implementing a cross-company process network has yielded big payoffs, the partners said. Shared, standardized and unified data structures means purchase orders are communicated and translated seamlessly across the supply chain. Prices and orders are updated faster and more accurately. And there’s better visibility into order progress, delivery dates and shipment details. All that has fostered greater agility, efficiency, mutual understanding and collaboration, making it easier to optimize future processes.
Process intelligence identifying positive interventions for at-risk youth
Celosphere was also an opportunity for Celonis to showcase two projects from its “Celonis for People” initiative. The effort works with NGOs, Public Sector agencies and other organizations in sectors like healthcare to leverage Process Intelligence in creative, people-centric ways.
The first project is a collaboration between Celonis and SOS Children’s Villages to enhance donor engagement and optimize operations. Through a new Donor Impact application, the NGO, which focuses on “improving the lives of children and young people without parental care or at risk of losing it,” can give donors a clear view of the impact their donations are making.
The second project demonstrates how process intelligence can deliver better outcomes in juvenile justice. Working together, Celonis, researchers from William & Mary, Erin Espinosa, the head of research at non-profit Evident Change used Celonis to analyze data from the juvenile justice and mental health systems of a large U.S. state. Celonis enabled them to see gaps between the systems that can lead to negative outcomes for children and families. These insights can be used to reform the juvenile justice and mental health systems in ways that foster positive outcomes.
For 2025, new industries and profitable process ideas
In the coming year, adoption of process improvement software is expected to keep climbing, with worldwide sales projected to exceed $22 billion by 2030, a CAGR of 49.2%. At Celonis, Cassiano expects cross-company process initiatives will continue to occupy an important place among the 100+ major projects his international teams will tackle.
In the meantime, new partner-developed apps continue to roll out, including plant maintenance (Marcadus), maintenance control (Ashling Partners), cross-border payments (ProcessLab) and taxes (KMLZ). Cassiano sees continued opportunity for industry-specific, revenue-generating apps and more .
Promising process optimization solutions will continue to flow through proven practices used by Celonis to keep innovation flowing. On “Freaky Fridays”, employees, partners, customers, top innovators, industry consultants from Gartner and elsewhere — even competitors — gather to brainstorm and develop ideas. Concepts that don’t make the cut are quickly relegated to the “Celonis Graveyard” — reflecting the Silicon Valley “fail-fast” philosophy that has served the fast-growing company well. Celonis recently advanced to #13 on the 2024 Forbes Cloud 100 list.
Will continued advancement of standardized data structures and optimized models for functions and industries eventually bump into industry or global standards bodies, like International Organization for Standardization (ISO), or prompt concerns about lock-in? Precisely the opposite, says Cassiano: creating and promulgating universal specifications or trapping customers is the antithesis of the company’s open model.
“We don’t want to own the platform,” he says, repeating a popular Celonis maxim. “We are more like venture capitalists. We provide a nice open platform which we believe has a strong competitive advantage, and unique selling point, which is the process data and business context.”
Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact
