Celonis Reviews

I have used the solution for POCs and POVs on P2P, procure-to-pay and order-to-cash processes. I have also worked on a project that involved implementing a Starter Kit using Celonis for procure-to-pay. Celonis offers Starter Kits for multiple use cases. Celonis has also been used in our company for incident management and automated solutions using the ML workbench. 

I have dealt with majorly two types of customers with Celonis. There are strategic customers who use the product for one or two months duration to check the reports for high-level processes. The other types of customers for Celonis are operational customers who use the product daily using the profile view. 

One of the vital features is the solution's easy integration with varying sources. The end-to-end process view offered by Celonis is another crucial feature that no other analytical tool is able to provide. 

Celonis' data engineering processes should be transformed into a low-code structure. Excessive coding is still required across the Starter Kits, where the market is focusing on low-code automation or transformations. The tool's UI should also be more intuitive. The data engineering pipeline within Celonis is highly technical. 

The interface in future versions of Celonis can have a drag-and-drop format with a more intuitive configuration. If you check other solutions like Power BI, business professionals can use it without technical experience, but usually, the same person won't be able to use Celonis freely. In the standard deployment of Celonis, you will need one project manager, an expert value architect, and two or three developers to manage the design pipeline.

If your organization has a partner for executing all the Celonis pipelines, then it must be ensured that a COE is assigned in-house for hypercare needs. For instance, if some KPIs need to be changed or if irrelevancy is found, maintenance needs to be implemented every year or every six months for KPI adjustments and rebuilding of sources or logic.

The aforementioned maintenance tasks for Celonis are usually carried out by an in-house COE; without a COE, maintenance can become challenging. 

I have been using Celonis for more than three years. 

The solution is often unstable, and issues occur, requiring tickets to be raised with the vendor. Common issues include inaccessible dashboards, non-displayed KPIs, and unavailable source content. A dedicated professional is needed in the organization to deal with such aforementioned issues. 

It's a scalable solution for the cloud properties. 

I am unsatisfied with Celonis' support experience. The response time is huge, but a response always arrives from the support team. 

Positive

Celonis' initial setup process is very simple, especially if POCs and POVs are implemented using manual data. But the implementation of Celonis for data engineering aspects and transformations can be extremely complicated due to excessive technicalities. Our organization uses the cloud version of the product. 

To deploy Celonis at our organization, we begin with data analysis and try to identify the sources. Then, process connectors are used to integrate the sources. The aforementioned steps are implemented based on the two-way quality environment.

The data is downloaded directly on Celonis as per the client's requirement and timespan, after which the extraction phase arrives, where we implement the transformation using the selective tables, activity tables, and case tables.

As part of the aforementioned step, varying support dimensions from sources like SAP are used and the data job is created. Once the data job runs, the activity and case table are loaded with data, post which the data jobs can be explored on varying process explorers. Then based on the overall KPIs the deployment process of Celonis is completed. 

If the Starter Kit is being used, then data validation needs to be implemented in addition to the aforementioned processes. The deployment process of Celonis has three phases: the first is the analysis phase, followed by the build phase, and the value training phase.

The deployment duration majorly depends on the sources; for instance, if you have SAP as a source and the standard modules have been scoped out, it would take a month for analysis, two months for design and another two months for value creation, so it takes five to six months overall to deploy Celonis for standard sources like SAP or Oracle, but for custom-built solutions it can take one or two extra months. 

In our organization, we measure two KPIs, which are time-to-value and time-for-value and these factors are used to calculate the ROI. There is definitely an ROI for Celonis due to the extremely innovative methodology and premise. 

Celonis is the most expensive solution in the market, and many customers are ready to migrate to more affordable solutions such as ARIS and SAP Signavio. Celonis must reduce its costs globally, especially in countries like India. 

Celonis is extremely innovative compared to other tools. The data pipeline needs to be improved, but I would rate Celonis a ten out of ten for innovation. 

Customers of Celonis either follow the strategic KPIs or the operational KPIs. The strategic customers reap the benefits by utilizing the transformational aspect of Celonis, for instance, including strategic KPIs such as automation capability and checking the increase or decrease in automation rate of the core system.

On the other hand, operational customers might check KPIs related to incident rates, bottlenecks, and throughput time so that immediate decisions can be made using Celonis. The aforementioned KPIs help the operational customers strategically budget the digital transformation projects. 

Celonis helps customers improve their business model through the automation approach, which might have been previously a preventive approach. Celonis presently follows a pro-active approach that helps in anticipating what bugs might be found. 

The Execution Management System (EMS) of Celonis has helped in identifying and addressing inefficiencies across processes. The aforementioned features provide a centralized view. I would recommend others to use process mining solutions, but I would leave them to their own decision and expertise to choose the most suitable one for their organization, Celonis should be among the top choices. 

The biggest trend with Celonis is that it's already equipped with object-oriented process mining that integrates multiple sources. I believe OCPM is one of the market trends that only Celonis has successfully implemented. 

Celonis allows the integration of automation features with process mining through the acquisitions of firms like Integromat and Make. Communication and task mining are other industry trends that Celonis is able to leverage. I would rate Celonis as eight out of ten overall. 

We use the solution for Process Mining for Order To Cash, Procure2Pay, and Finance (AR,AP) processes. O2C process was identified for mining as it spans multiple departments. Celoni from Order Management, Planning, Operations, and Finance and leveraging O2C Process Cockpit, we were able to quickly get details insights, anomalies, and discover bottlenecks. 

We were able to understand how process variants have organically grown, with huge deviations, delays, human touches, reworks, and huge cycle times between department handovers. The potential Opportunity Cash Value identified was around $19 million. 

Celonis EMS is hosted on Cloud integrated to Oracle EBS R12 on-prem database using an on-prem DB link agent.

Process mining helped us to discover, identify, and process anomalies, bottlenecks, cycle time, automate rates, and rework for O2C process spanned across multiple departments from Order Management, Planning, Operations, and Finance.

We managed to calculate 14 Industry standards process-centric KPIs like OnTimeDelivery, Shipment,1st-time-right, Touchless Rate, Rework Rate, Automation Rate, Pick-Pack-Ship Rate, Fulfillment Rate, DSO, DPOs, and Cost per Order. We managed to define and enforce process ownership across the business process and make Business Units accountable through KPI mappings. We leveraged Process Mined KPIs from APQC, DCMetrics, HighRadius, Celonis nd Novigo Platforms.

The Process Discovery and Opportunity Identification part was completed in three weeks. 

1. It is super easy to integrate a cloud-hosted EMS platform with an on-premise Oracle EBS DB (we managed to import 7ears of Oracle EBS data - 6.8 million records in two hours).

2. There are abundant prebuild process connectors available in Celonis marketplace which has accelerated our onboarding to install the Oracle EBS O2C, AP, AR, P2P, and OOTB KPIs.

3. It provides seamless unified views with awesome drill down options.

4. It's easy to write PQL queries for extracting KPIs, and easy to add, and customize filters and dashboards.  

5. It enables Touchless ERP automations leveraging EMS - action flows, automation, and action center for business units. 

1. The marketplace should offer process connectors for Oracle JDEdwards, and Peoplesoft.

2. If we can have prebuilt apps and a process cockpit for Oracle EBS Warehouse Management and Inventory Management.

3.  We need more documentation and examples of PQL language. That would be an improvement.

4. Importing data into Celonis should provide date/month/year import options so that you can import specific periods of data. 

5. Licenses are costly and calculated based on APC and the number of users. It should offer a more flexible option for initial data uploads. A pay-as-you-go model is not available yet.

We have been using Celonis Process Mining platform for more than six months now.

The platform has been completely stable and flawless since we have been using it.

It's easily scalable to any business process within the enterprise.

It's been excellent working with Celonis support engineers. CSM has been seamless, and very responsive. They take ownership and lead the issue and bring in expert SMEs when required.

Positive

We used UiPath Process Mining. We switched to Celonis as they had more cool out-of-box features compared to UiPath. 

The setup is very straightforward; the whole setup took us less than two days.

We used our vendor and Celonis engineers.

The ROI depends on how fast you are able to find process anomalies and business cases that benefit the enterprise WRT Cost, Labor productivity, and employee efficiency. For O2C alone, we found automation opportunities for 7000 hours, making the ROI recovered within 9 to 11 months.  

If you are new to process mining you can try the Snap/Snap+ versions offered by Celonis which are free/ under $10,000 with a fixed APC data size and fixed set of analyst, admin, and member users. You can do a pilot leveraging the Snap+ version post that you could go for the full EMS version which provides more advanced features but comes with a cost. For example, Celonis EMS APC-100G and 10 Users = $80,000-$95,000/year.

UiPath Process Mining was evaluated.

Process Mining adoption within the organization is a cultural change especially if you have siloed business units across the business process. You have to onboard the business users and analysts and make them understand how this platform helps and empowers them to go from a reactive to a more proactive mode and be more strategic vs being tactical.   

I use it to understand the process to see whether we have the bottlenecks. To map the quotas. And to see if that way, which is the information flowing immediately. Hoping how bad this thing is in the process. 

We're currently visualizing data in the tools. We're setting up a proxy to pay some NetSuite and PTP. We're also analyzing data and visualizing QPI. So, we've been reviewing work, gathering data, putting everything together, and visualizing it in Celonis. It's been helpful in that way.

We're not even using Celonis to its maximum capability. There's still much to discover about how this tool is developing.

One of the best aspects is the ability to match documents for intercompany transactions. We use this a lot, and it's very helpful.

Because we need to understand what's happening within the company when we have internal transactions and charges between business units, this used to be done manually. Now, with Celonis, we can match them automatically and in real time. That's been helpful.

It could be less expensive.

I have been using this solution for a year. I work with the latest version. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. It's very good. It offers good data consistently. It's somehow standardizing the way how the information is provided, and all those dashboards are very useful. So, it's a very good tool. We like it here.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It is very easy to scale. It works globally. I can analyze data globally. I can go see the process end-to-end for various streams. It's a very good tool.

We have high-profile managers and directors using Celonis for the outcome. They are not working with Celonis per se, but they are using the outcomes and the results of the website.

There are around 50 end users using this solution in my company. 

It's used every single day. The data is uploaded daily automatically from SAP. So, all the data is gathered, and the functionality gives value.

We plan to increase the further usage. We want to extend it to another team, but it's about budget and cost. So, we will see how we will do that.

We have an internal team. The team who works with the product, addressed the technical support. The result was satisfactory.

Positive

I did not have direct experience with the deployment process. But from what I saw, it was not so hard. What was pretty pretty straightforward. It's working very, very well with SAP.

I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy. I believe it took a couple of months to deploy. 

The deployment process was handled in-house. We have a team that takes care of the maintenance and updates. There were five to ten people involved. 

They work in continuous improvement as Celonis implementation, execution, or whatever.  

We have seen an ROI. We are spending less time gathering and analyzing the data, actually, not just analyzing or putting together any contracting dashboards and tables whatsoever. So, calculating the KPI. It's very useful in this research.

I would rate this return on investment seventy percent, where one is zero percent, and ten is a hundred percent return on investment.

It's pretty expensive. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being expensive. 

It works very well if you have money. It is working very well on a single version of Celonis, meaning if you have one ERP globally, all are already implemented. If you have many, it's a bit more difficult. But if you have only one ERP across all these teammates in the group,  this is a nice tool to use.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten because it is expensive. 

Our main use cases for Celonis cover finance use cases and analyzing comparable performance.

Celonis provides business process analysis and technical consulting for deployment.

The process mapping is most valuable to us. It shows the sections of the different timestamps and the statistical information on the timestamps' waiting time. So that feature helps us give feedback to businesses and identify the final root cause.

They could provide artificial intelligence where, based on data they collect from reference cases, they could give us suggestions. For example, we see a long delay between steps, and based on the context, they could provide more suggestions on where the problem could be, and that would provide a very different value proposition for the solution. Likewise, if you can't define something as account receivable or account payable, Celonis could ask a lot of questions to fix the context to provide the right recommendation. It would be relatively easy.

It has been three years since we started using Celonis, and we are using the SaaS version.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten because we have not seen performance issues so far.

I rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten, it is very scalable. We have 200 end users using Celonis globally. Developers have multiple use cases.

Their consultants are quite knowledgeable.

Positive

We have used UiPath, they also have a process analysis tool. We did a POC and saw that it's lighter and easier to adapt, but the functionality was limited. That's why we don't use it anymore.

As a German software, Celonis' initial setup is difficult, so I rate the initial setup a five out of ten. Celonis has a learning curve. It's not very easy-to-handle software. It takes one month to negotiate and deploy the solution.

When deploying the solution, not counting the data of the consulting engagement, we have the environment discussion and the setup of the AWS environment their consultants put into the system. Then we do the rough testing, run some simple cases through the system, verify, and then go ahead. After that, we announce we can provide services to external customers. Overall, those are the general steps standard for any IT application. One or two people are enough for deployment. The solution is not a big one.

I rate Celonis' pricing a ten out of ten because it is expensive.

Celonis is now becoming the corporate standard solution. That's why we have been talking to the team at the global COE to get support for any future requirements. There's no extended collaboration with external companies anymore.

Celonis has identified the product's limitation, which is that it tells me where the problem is, but it cannot fix the problem. The tool only gives the proposal to fix it. Celonis is aware of the problem and provides transparency, and they are looking for solutions and options for businesses, but that is not in its scope. For example, when you go to a hospital and use an X-ray machine to understand what's happening, you won't expect the machine to fix your problem. You still have to get a doctor to do the operation and fix the problem. Celonis uses some of its features to solve problems, but not so successfully in all areas. Businesses are dynamic, and we are aware of our problems, and more transparency is great, but fixing that problem is much more valuable to us.

We are not considering increasing the usage at this stage because the business has just completed the first wave of deployment. Also, the license is not cheap.

Two things to keep in mind before choosing Celonis: do not think the solution can be easily adopted just because it is valuable for others. The system relies highly on the availability of data. Your company or business environment should provide the data that can fit the solution, especially since the timestamps available show the value. The second thing is that though process mining is valuable, double-check with businesses as to what they do to follow the transparency to convert the investment into business value. I rate Celonis an eight out of ten.

We have done ITSM. And for Citibank, we have done some process mining. I have done it for Citibank. And for accounts payable, we have done it for one of our clients. For resolution time and DSOs, on-time deliveries, all this is what we have done.

I find Action Engine for notifying the user, and also Studio Spark, and knowledge models; all these features are useful. 

Action flows are still very useful, like for notifying the user, notifications, alerting them, updating the tables, and notifying the approvals side for ITSM so that the on-time delivery would be increased or the resolution time would decrease.

I want to see improvements in terms of machine learning. In the future, there are a lot of things to do with machine learning, so I want to do that with Celonis.

Another area of improvement is implementation. So, in future releases, I would like to see a more streamlined implementation process would be appreciated, making it less time-consuming and more efficient.

Also, there is room for improvement in technical support. 

I've been using Celonis for three and a half years now. So, we use EMS.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. There are ten people in our team using this solution. We are looking to expand the usage of the solution. 

Customer service and support depend on the partnership we have with them, but they respond to us quickly within a day or two. We have good support, which is compared to other tools like UiPath, and Celonis has good support. We receive good support. 

Positive

I was trying out Tableau before. I worked with it for three to four months. But Celonis is the first tool I worked with separately.

I also tested UiPath. But Celonis is better from a development perspective. Celonis is very compatible with the developer side because of the transformations that UiPath is doing; we have to download and do the necessary transformations in Visual Studio, and then we should upload it and test it in a test environment. I have seen that it's not that compatible compared to Celonis. 

In Celonis, we have a custom building of KPIs and all, but in UiPath, we have only some metrics and aggregated functions we can use. We cannot customize the metrics like we can in Celonis. 

Also, in Celonis, it's obvious how we can design our dashboard however we like, but in UiPath, we cannot do that. We can only adjust the VPN lens,  which is not as good as what I feel. When it comes to extraction, it supports only a few things. They have only a few templates I have, where the service provides a hundred plus ads, which you cannot directly inject your data. 

But in Celonis, you have the option to do that. When it comes to data science, you need a separate license for UiPath, which is another added cost. So, UiPath is, of course, is different from Celonis in various aspects.

For Celonis, the initial setup depends on what type of connection it is. Suppose it's RTSM or something like that, we can have direct connectivity, or we can go with the extractor-based. 

But when it comes to SAP or DNS integration and all, the installation of RSC modules, all these come in. So, it is a bit time-consuming if it's not a direct connection.

For me, it took three weeks for the connectivity with on-premise SAP. And for ITSM, it took eight days or something. And it also depends on the client's networking and the support we get from them, it all depends on that.

For the implementation strategy, I usually get the tables I go to the table side, look at the unique keys and the relations between the tables, and then I construct the case table. 

And then I go with the activities, what would the activities be, reporting, how can we do any transformation? Sometimes, when I was working with the Oracle database, there was a non-unique field term which is not a visible one. Then we converted it to the human-readable monthly date format on the transformation side. 

And there's a US daylight saving logic that we worked on to make it more compatible and meaningful. When it comes to the dashboard side and scheduling, it helped with daylight saving. 

And then all these installation transformation sites. I go with the data model building, trigger tables, and any simple interaction engine, we work on the table side, activity table, and case table mapping, which is managed to the end. 

After all this, I load the data model, then I build the dashboard with the basic process explorer, then I go to the transformations, and they have a meeting with the client. This is how it's going on. Then, we build the KPIs depending on the use case they're looking for. 

And also all these things, automation, action flows, action agent performance, root cause analysis, and the violations affecting the process. And then testing, we do a comparison with the source table and what we are getting before it's going to the client.

I needed three or four people for one process.

The price is reasonable. It cost around $10,000. But when you're making an investment and considering the data aspect and facing transformations, you gain valuable insights visually. In comparison, I find Celonis to be less expensive than UiPath.

I just want to learn more tools for process mining so that I can have an idea of which tool works and I can understand the limitations of this tool. If you learn too many tools. So, I just want to get a grip on process mining tools. 

Celonis is a good tool. From my experience, it offers substantial value.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

The main use cases for Celonis are twofold. Firstly, it involves the end-to-end implementation of Celonis for various business processes so that clients can monitor their business processes. Secondly, there's a secondary use case related to internal audits. Here, we analyze one to two years of data to identify process inefficiencies and other pain points.

In one of our client’s normal implementation projects, we identified different pain points using Celonis. Celonis identified a lot of rework, and we implemented some additional improvements, like RPA. This way, the rework can be minimized, reducing human involvement. This improvement was possible because of Celonis.

The product helps clients visualize potential savings by minimizing human errors and reducing manual work. These aspects can be effectively identified and implemented using Celonis. It is the goal for all the Celonis projects.

The purchase and ticketing management processes could be improved. The solution must be more user-friendly. Another room for improvement is the interface. A few different coding languages, such as Python, SQL, and YAML, are being used right now. To use the product completely, we have to know all these languages. It is a little difficult for beginners to learn so many new things together. If there are one or two languages or drag-and-drop features, it will be easier for new users.

Celonis provides many updates every month or every quarter. It is difficult for the implementation partners to stay updated with the features they are providing. The product is already adding many new features every quarter.

I have been using the solution for almost four years now. I currently use the latest version.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten because it is already a market leader. I have worked with different clients from different regions of the world. Almost all the clients prefer Celonis for process mining. Many clients are also moving from traditional reporting tools like Power BI or Tableau to Celonis.

I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten. It is moderately easy. The solution is deployed on the cloud.

A standard deployment process takes around six to eight weeks. Initially, we set up the connection with the client's source system and Celonis. Then, we extract the data, transform it, and create the dashboard and reports as required. Finally, we analyze the visualization to identify the pain points.

I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten. The solution is quite expensive. It has some customized plans for different partners. Sometimes Celonis sells the licenses directly to the client, and we only implement it. So the licensing cost depends on the requirement, but it is costly.

I mostly work on cross-industry projects with multiple vendors from different industries and domains. The projects mainly revolve around processes like purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, accounts payable, accounts receivable, ticketing, and integration management. There are a few KPIs that we track, and it depends on the process. For example, in the purchase-to-pay process, we have KPIs like reworks, automation, and segregation of duties. Based on these KPIs, we try to implement improvements and optimize the process flow wherever we see room for improvement.

I will recommend the solution to others because it will open up completely new potentials in their existing business process. They can know how their existing business processes can be optimized and improved. We can discover so many new things using Celonis, which is impossible with any other traditional reporting tool in the industry. The tool has many different capabilities, like automation. It is a complete tool. The solution has a few issues.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for procure to pay, order to cash, and warehouse management. Essentially, we utilized OCPM model, which facilitated the connection of three distinct processes. By linking these processes, we were able to identify inefficiencies across the entire workflow, spanning from warehousing to account payable and order to cash. The process of connecting these three processes took approximately three months. Subsequently, we achieved a value realization of around 15 million dollars in monetary terms.

Celonis has robust process mining capabilities, conducted thousands of successful implementations across various clients. Currently, Celonis offers not only process mining but also process modeling within its suite of tools. Their approach has evolved from case-centric process mining to OCPM, which represents a different paradigm in the field. This shift to OCPM has been successful for Celonis, allowing for more effective analysis and optimization of processes.

The solution is stable.

Celonis is known for its stability and scalability. It seamlessly integrates with various tools, including RPA tools, and offers a user-friendly interface, making it easier to use compared to some other products. However, the claim that SAP products have less ability to integrate heterogeneous systems compared to SolarWinds is inaccurate. Both Celonis and SolarWinds have the capability to integrate with a variety of systems, including SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, and Salesforce. Additionally, both companies provide technical documentation to guide users through the integration process.

30 people are engaged with the solution.

We primarily reached out to Celonis when encountering issues or when we needed to activate specific features that we were entitled to but were not enabled by default. In these cases, we contacted Celonis technical or customer support for assistance.

Celonis is simple to use, but OCPM requires a deeper understanding from the business. It can be a bit complicated to use. Overall, the platform is very intuitive. It has aided us in coding and building views in one and a half to two months, making it very user-friendly for us.

Celonis is expensive but it depends on the deals. If Celonis's market strategy is more aligned with providing a lot of discounts, then it's a very complicated pricing strategy. Typically, partners are entitled to some credit points.

The mining capability of Celonis is very mature compared to other products.

Celonis is certified with numerous major compliance verifications. As a tool, it boasts close to 40 certifications, including GDPR, ISO, and COSO. Additionally, it is SOC 2 compliant.

First of all, Celonis is a good tool for process mining. Companies planning to implement Celonis or purchase a license, they need to first determine their strategy for utilizing it. Simply using Celonis as a platform may not yield significant results. To maximize value, they should consider leveraging Celonis' Value Accelerators. If they aim to identify and address inefficiencies, it's essential to quantify them. Celonis can assist in quantifying various inefficiencies and automating processes to mitigate them, resulting in tangible savings. For instance, in a procure-to-pay process, increasing realized cash discounts from five percent to ten percent can lead to substantial savings. Similarly, parameters like accounts receivable turnover can be measured, offering a promising return on investment or license purchase.

Celonis utilizes PIG with AI capabilities to develop Copilot, a tool aimed at providing insightful analysis by interpreting user commands such as querying specific KPIs. This system is efficient in generating alarms on the backend and producing matrices based on user inputs.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My primary use cases are in the finance area. We use it in invoice processing, P2P (Procure-to-Pay) processes, etc. 

The idea is to track the entire process, from onboarding a vendor, issuing a purchase requisition (PR), getting a quotation, and creating a purchase order (PO). 

Celonis helps identify deviations, delays, reworks, and quality issues within that process. It reveals things like which vendor types or invoice categories tend to have the most issues. These are the insights we can get from the data.

Celonis has helped me to identify and prioritize process improvement areas. Because we understand the end-to-end lead time, including waiting times and areas where rework happens, we can see the performance bottlenecks. 

Celonis also shows us the typical critical path, how often it's followed, and how frequently there are deviations. With all this information, we can easily prioritize improvement projects. 

We target areas needing the most improvement for significant impact. Celonis has its own instances to support this.

Celonis is vital wherever we need process improvement, lead time reduction, improved quality, or reduced rework. It works across various domains. Within finance and accounts, we have many ready-made APIs, which makes deploying Celonis easy. From there, it's simple to identify the right use cases. Overall, Celonis is particularly powerful within finance.

I haven't personally used the AI features for process improvement, but at a larger scale, we could use classification techniques. This means creating predefined queries using ML [Machine Learning]. Based on the data, these queries would perform the functions we designed. 

For example, if we want Celonis to classify invoices paid with or without POs, or analyze the volume of version payments, the AI models can do this when normal queries might not.

The dashboards are helpful. They allow you to customize performance views and filter by specific criteria. Additionally, the AI interventions, like machine learning algorithms, that can be customized are very valuable features.

It also offers real-time process visualization. It's been useful for creating management dashboards. We can develop performance summaries for areas like the O2C [Order-to-Cash] or P2P [Procure-to-Pay] processes. These highlight problems and identify specific vendors or customers needing attention. Having these performance measures on hand greatly assists decision-making during process-related discussions.

One area for improvement is that, while Celonis has existing APIs for some domains like accounts, it lacks ready-made ones for others, like financial services. This means we need to customize our data channels so the data can be used by Celonis. 

There's a lot of pre-work needed to cleanse and harmonize data attributes before it's usable with Celonis. That's the main issue I see with the tool.

Let's use an example of a financial process, such as loan origination. An application comes in and is scanned. Someone then reviews it, capturing the details. 

After review, it enters the organization system, potentially with bypass steps. There are different stages: validating the application, capturing data, validating documents, and deciding whether to accept the loan. We need to precisely define these stages.

In many organizations, this data might not readily exist. We can't just use Celonis with existing data; it needs harmonization first. 

This means we might not be able to leverage existing data in Celonis, starting from scratch instead. If an organization has ten years of data, we need to cleanse it at the data point level and metadata level. 

This involves merging, simplifying, removing, and relabeling attributes. It's a lot of work. Celonis works well when this pre-work is done. Right now, good facilitating tools are missing, even from Microsoft. We need to harmonize those timestamps manually before connecting the data to Celonis, which provides the analysis output we need.

I hope Celonis simplifies this process in future releases.

I have done a certification in this product. So, I used it for six to eight months. 

It is a highly stable product. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

It's highly scalable. Since it has premade APIs for finance, we can scale from or across organizations. It can handle multiple ERPs, navigation variations, and such. So, I see no issues with scaling.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

The customer service and support has been fine. 

Positive

For standard procedures, it's easily deployable. However, we do need technical support from Celonis experts for the deployment process. 

After that, we need people who'll design the specific use cases to be implemented in Celonis, and then the team who'll use it for process improvement. 

So, there are various stakeholders involved. Overall, while deployment is possible, it does require some support from Celonis.

For the initial data cleansing part, I'd rate my experience with Celonis itself a three out of ten, with ten being easy because we have to pre-setup. We need to cleanse the existing data, and that's a challenge.

However, for the initial setup of Celonis Search, I would rate my experience a seven out of ten, with ten being easy.  

There is some support required for the deployment of Celonis.

It's a very good tool with lots of customization options for dashboards and queries.  

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.