What is our primary use case?
We use Celonis for process mining, discovery, credit management, billing, cash application. Also insights from Celonis are being used to support major ERP implementation project
How has it helped my organization?
Firstly, we discovered the process and were able to see the real picture. We were able to see how much and where the real process deviates from the standards that we assumed.
Secondly, we were also able to trigger improvement initiatives using Celonis to change performance operations where it was required the most.
Thirdly, we were able to use Celonis insights to create our strategy as it provided the base for quantitative process features. It gave us insights into how much, when, and how many different notions happened within our process.
We use those three to formulate our strategy and scope and plan our resources for implementing the strategy.
What is most valuable?
For the amount of information that it processes, it works relatively fast. I like the visual presentation and the interface is intuitive. I also like that Celonis has a learning academy.
What needs improvement?
Complexity is the biggest problem. You need a large amount of skill and knowledge to work with the tool. You need to understand it and know more than the basics.
It takes a huge amount of effort to build a good dashboard in Celonis because of the complexities of understanding how all those different processes work together, calculate them, and build them in Celonis.
If you need to do something custom or create an analysis on your own, you'll need to learn a lot, and it'll take weeks. This is not a self-service tool. Let's be honest. Many companies say that they have thousands of Celonis users, and this is probably true. But I don't really think that Celonis is an application that should be used in the organization by general operational people. This is more a tool for global process owners or process improvement functions.
In future I would like to see alerts, better self-service capabilities, and cross-applicational KPIs in the next release.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Celonis within the last 18 months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Celonis is fairly stable. I would say it's reliable, and I would give it four out of five. Celonis depends on the underlying database, and probably in the cloud, it's going to be a different story than what we have experienced. Overall consider it as a stable solution, but we definitely had some problems not so long ago. I definitely wouldn't give it five out of five.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is very good. We have about 30 active users. Their roles are the global process owner team, the operational team who actually runs the process, and the strategic consultant for process improvement.
The product is actually being used every week. We have plans to increase our user base by building a superuser community to leverage it more. But we're not planning to expand it to new user groups or new processes.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is good. I would give them a four out of five. Our support isn't with Celonis. We have the COE model. Our support organization is different from the Celonis organization. The ITL sourcing company supports the product, and it's not necessarily Celonis.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was complex. We went with the standard setup, and then we did some customization at the end. This approach eventually gave us the dashboards that we wanted.
What about the implementation team?
There were three to five people in a team that deployed this solution. It took over a year to implement Celonis. But some of this was probably related to our infrastructure and not the product. It was quite a lengthy implementation.
What was our ROI?
I think we got a return on our investment. We have not done any formal calculation of our ROI, but one of our use cases was really where we found large processing efficiency through Celonis. It indicated a very high rate in one country, and we ran the improved initiative there. Now, we see a reduction there. Orders are getting faster, clients are happier, and we can also redeploy the resources to process something else.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Celonis is expensive. It's not for mid or low-sized enterprises because the license price is high. Overall, it's quite pricey compared to anything else that I have heard about. But the good thing is that they don't charge per user. They charge for the data model.
What other advice do I have?
I would tell potential users that they really need to understand why they need this tool and have the right expectations. People tend to mix up this need and think that Celonis is a silver bullet. It's not true.
Celonis is specific to process mining. Use it for process mining and nothing else. Be clear on these expectations with management. It's best to involve the business to really find definite KPIs. Define the metrics before the start of the project. This is essential to ensure that the insights are exactly in the area as expected. They also need to decide if they want a standard package or not.
I think we made a highly complex security system which requires a lot of software to maintain. We could have probably simplified that. If I implement Celonis again, I will be very clear and specific about our expectations. I would tell them what they should expect rather than what they have been told by consultants and managers who tend to overpromote the system.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give Celonis a nine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
*Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
