AiThority Interview with Lars Reinkemeyer, VP of Customer Transformation at Celonis

Hi, Lars. Please tell us about your current role and the team / technology you handle in the company.

As vice president of customer transformation at Celonis I am in charge of driving digital strategies for our customers to help optimize their business operations through the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) and core process mining technology. Many enterprises are plagued with a fragmented software landscape that creates costly bottlenecks. We help our customers overcome this by designing and incorporating EMS Centers of Excellence to drive high performance and unlock execution capacity. Through our AI and machine learning capabilities, we can help them achieve transparency and navigate operations to achieve maximum efficiency. We’re also continuing to nurture the overall process mining community through the creation of expert council and advisory boards to share best practices and expertise to advance in technology and industry innovations.

What is Celonis and what are your key products and solutions?

Celonis is the global leader in Execution Management Software, pioneering process mining into a new era. The Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) is designed to eliminate system complexity, the number one capacity killer in business. We leverage our process mining core to draw data from underlying systems and identify and measure capacity barriers. We then provide the best-in-class knowledge, actions, and automations to systematically remove these constraints from the business. Process mining was like the diagnostic X-Ray or MRI of a business, EMS is like the heart monitor constantly looking for irregularities and automatically prescribing treatments.

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How does Celonis help in digital transformation? How do you measure the performance of your customer’s platform adoption?

While an innovative tool is a great enabler, it obviously takes more to drive digital transformation. We have developed a profound methodology to support customers with framing, realizing and sustaining value. Centers of Excellence are typically established as a central accelerator in an organization to achieve this value – it can be designed to provide a platform as a service, process mining as a service or even transformation as a service. We consult with our customers to help them define the right value proposition and staffing, all while measuring performance constantly, typically by realized value.

Tell us more about the concept “Hyper Automation”. What kind of organizational foundation should a company have to adapt to a hyper-automated environment?

In the automation world, there is a “hyper-automate everything” group that’s been around for a while. In fact, Gartner declared hyperautomation as the number one technology trend of 2020. The motto goes: If it moves, automate it. You can find a lot of the RPA vendors dropping bots on everything that moves. And it’s understandable, as the impact of COVID-19 has driven reduced workforces to look for any help they can get. The short term automation-fix might feel good but the automation-tax is going to be high once those bots start limping and eventually breaking down.

Your take on AI/ML’s role in automation technologies.

AI and ML have already shown business value. In my previous role at Siemens we had started in 2018 to train algorithms to predict, for example, which deliveries are going to be too late. Based on prediction and reliability levels, the logistics dispatcher could take early measures to assure on-time delivery. Technology has progressed significantly since then and today there are more action engines in place, which sense execution gaps and send proactive signals to the user in charge – or even auto-execute certain activities. The Execution Management System can pick up this exciting idea and strives for maximum identification and remediation of execution gaps, based on AI and ML technologies. While the past has seen software which required human intelligence to derive measures, the EMS provides artificial intelligence that will execute and increase share of tasks.

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Your prediction on the future of customer experience transformation using Cloud / SaaS platforms.

There is a clear trend towards cloud, and the Celonis’ EMS as a cloud-native service is extremely well adopted. To date there are more than 250 companies and more than 3,000 systems connected to our cloud solution. My prediction is that most customers will move to cloud due to the compelling advantages, which to name a few are higher performance and availability, quick access to innovations and less effort for operations. Our standardized execution apps are cloud best practice offerings, which customers can very easily adopt to optimize their process execution. And there will be more execution apps, as it was just recently announced with the strategic partnership with Siemens GBS, which brings together the best in process experience and execution management – for future cloud offerings.

Any advice to every CIO looking to improve digital transformation models for their company.

There is advice for hundreds of different scenarios and each case obviously needs to be assessed individually. My top three recommendations would be: 1. Be bold and consider an innovative execution layer, which allows you to sense execution gaps across the traditional transactional systems 2. leverage the power of data and execution management to support the transformation strategy of your organization; 3. Establish a Center of Excellence to drive transformation and make it tangible with daily transparency on progress. And a bonus tip: enjoy the ride, things are changing like never before.

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Thank you, Lars! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.