Celonis Reviews

I'm employed as a process mining expert.

I had prepared a proof of concept regarding segregation of duty. We used to have a lot of problems with the segregation of duties of SAP. The solutions that we use are ServiceNow, SAP, and one other. SAP has three systems, the first one is the main enterprise system, the second is the AP one, which is used for planning, and the third is the CRM system. 

We also have something called DW, which is a data warehousing system. I was mostly in the security sphere, such as segregation of duties. There's no automatic role provisioning for the users who have joined the company or who are supposed to use SAP. We need to provide the accesses manually. We have to analyze the risk for each of the roles by using the GRC tool in SAP. It's an intensive manual process. There used to be a lot of problems while giving the rules, and while giving the rules, there are different markets. This company operates in 64 different countries, such as Uganda, Budapest, India, and Sri Lanka. These countries have different rules to define into it. For example, a user in the UK shouldn't have access to India. There is no possibility that we can trace it because there is no standard flow. There is no way you can pass through the data or event logs through this because there is no foolproof way of preparing a workflow.

In Celonis, you have something called a Petri net. Petri net is a token-based entry system, which helps you to find out the way how the event logs work. You have something called concurrence, which means if a PO or an invoice creation can happen at the same time, a process mining tool will not pick these two activities in their chronological order, because they might have happened at the same time. However, a token-based approach would have been better and more accurate. You would know that this particular event was passed, but this event is supposed to pass on the fourth or fifth phase of the tokenization. This was not the situation we had. The Petri net is complicated compared to a Google DMN flow. Google DMN flow is easier.

Celonis is one of the best solutions on the market. It offers you a lot of training materials and exposure to its ecosystem. Celonis is trying its best to prepare an ecosystem for it because, without an ecosystem, you will not be able to scale up.

I have noticed Celonis and Azure, as Infrastructure-as-a-service do not communicate well with each other. Since Celonis has recently acquired PAF they would try to synergize their operations with Microsoft tools. In the next couple of years, they should be more connected to the Microsoft ecosystems. In the long term, they should integrate more with SAP which is a partner of Microsoft. This would result in cost efficiencies.

I have been using Celonis for approximately two years.

Celonis was a stable solution. My company was trying to understand the power of Celonis. They wanted to create a second line of defense when audits fail because the segregation of duty team needs to ensure that the audits had never failed. Working in an alcoholic beverage company, they always wanted to make sure the solution never fails, or at least we're able to show them mitigation steps if one audit fails. This is the reason why they started the Celonis process mining as a proof of concept.

The scalability of Celonis is good. They have a lot of use cases and a lot of experience they have gained over a period of time. They have multiple models and ecosystems. Additionally, they have a lot of prebuilt apps or extractors, because they have done a lot of implementation of process mining. I have worked with Alteryx Designer, but Alteryx Designer's problem is it's not as simple as Celonis. Alteryx designer uses a complicated methodology that you have to do from the scratch. With Celonis, you don't need to do that. There are a lot of prebuilt extractors, and you can use those extractors if you know where to get the data from. For example, your data table in SAP gives you these PO header items.

I have not contacted support. However, I attended one of the technical seminars of Celonis. One of the academic counselors was there and I found them extremely knowledgeable. 

I have used Camunda, Alteryx Designer, and Google DMN previously. The Camunda forms were cloud-based which was a benefit.

This is a cloud-based tool and it does not require an installation. You need to have a data extraction which could be a continuous process.

The implementation process time or difficulty depends on the complexity of the infrastructure. I haven't tested the integration on different scenarios.

Whenever I learn something, until I see any return on that investment, I would not invest in it. I have a serious plan of investing more time and resources in Celonis. I have found Celonis has a lot of new additions and it would be able to capture the markets very soon. The way the process improvements or process excellence is being looked at and the next progressive step for automation, I believe Celonis would play a vital role.

Celonis offers free learning possibilities. I am using the free version of Celonis.

I have evaluated many other tools.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Celonis a nine out of ten.

One main use case is to see change in price, why the change in price is happening? What are the plans associated with it? What can be done in the action engine? You have smart price detection. Based upon the smart price detection, it'll give you three options. Either you update the price in the master data, or you notify the procurement user accordingly.

We used to draw errors to be processed manually, and now you can actually get the digital information directly with the help of Celonis. That is a valuable feature that customers appreciate, as well as the throughput time, the time between two activities. Earlier, it was difficult for them to actually find out what was the time between two activities. But through Celonis, they can find that out.

A major room for improvement would be on the data connection trend, because we were trying to do a POC with a client that had multiple data systems, multiple ERPs. When we contact Celonis, we either get a very generic response or a very delayed response. Celonis will ask for some 86 different tables, as an example. They ask us to get the data for 86 different tables. When I'm doing a proof of concept, if I tell the client that I need 86 different tables, the client going to refuse and not even interact with me. There should be minimum tables, the eight or ten tables which you can use to do at least a minimum proof of concept.

I've been working with the solution for eight months.

The stability of the solution is good.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The technical support is very bad. Specifically, my answer is more biased towards the data point, the data connection. We hardly get any support for connecting the data.

The initial setup is complex. The proof of concept itself, connecting the data, finding out what tables are required, that itself is still unclear.

In the training also, they just talk about the SAP data tables. However, when we ask Celonis, they give us 86 different tables. They should be more specific as to phase wise. Phase one, you can start with these eight tables. Phase two, you can start with these eight tables. They should go step by step rather than asking for the entire universe of data.

There are multiple phases of implementation. One is the discovery phase and second is the enhance phase. We have been mostly involved in the discovery phase early. For that, I think 12 weeks would be a good estimate of timeframe. The major time goes in connecting the data only. Four to six weeks goes in just connecting the data.

My advice to anyone considering this solution is focus on the data part, focus on what the connectors are, which data tables are required, and get Celonis to give you exactly what is required page wise, rather than asking for 100 different tables. The clarity needs to be there.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We have been using it for process optimization. We use it for our procure-to-pay (P2P) process and accounts payable process. 

It is a complete cloud solution. It is hosted on Celonis Cloud, and we just get an instance of the solution. We are using its latest version.

We are trying to optimize all of our organizational processes with this solution. It gives full visibility of how a process is run end to end.

It has a strong capability for hosting a lot of data. It is quite robust. 

Automated root cause analysis and process explorer features are very good. It provides a lot of selections, such as process flow selection, attribute selection, etc.

Their communication related to the product roadmap should be improved. From a customer's point of view, they should communicate more about their product roadmap.

The way they manage the data should also be improved. There is a lot of room for improvement there because a lot of duplicated data gets created, which should be improved. There should be ease of data management and code management. 

Their support can also be improved. There is a lot of back and forth communication exchange with their service desk. I see a bit of improvement there.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years. I have been using it extensively during these years.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

In terms of its users, it is not being used by a lot of end-users in our organization. It is being used by IT solution experts and business process owners. We do have plans of increasing its usage. There will be similar people using the tool, but it will be expanded to other processes of the organization.

I have mixed feedback about their support. They are quick, but sometimes, there is a lot of exchange of questions back and forth. We also have some direct contacts through our customer success manager, and with their support, we are able to get the right technical support, but their service desk takes time. 

We didn't use any other solution previously.

From a product point of view, it was straightforward, but we had to undergo a lot of internal processes, which took time. It took about three months, but most of it was more from an internal process or governance point of view.

We consulted Celonis. Our experience with them was good. Being the vendor, they, of course, have very strong knowledge. They have very strong consultants.

I'm managing it, and I have two people reporting to me. So, we have two to three people for deployment at a given time. In the future, we'll have to expand.

We didn't evaluate other options. This was our first choice. It was a top-down directive.

They are bringing in many new features. One of the new features they have is Action Flows. It is a good feature, but we are yet to explore it extensively. We have an understanding of it, but we are yet to put it into full use. They are also working a lot on extending their process connectors. The way they're extending their process connectors is very beneficial.

It is a strong solution. My advice would be to get it implemented in strong collaboration with the solution experts. Whatever process you are working with, you should onboard the solution experts of that process because, without that, you may not get the correct results. The tool is capable, but you need to put people with the right knowledge on it.

When we started using the tool, we found a lot of cases where a certain type of non-compliance was highlighted, which is not the fault of the tool. With direct knowledge of the people or the solution experts, we understood that few cases are normal and few cases are not normal. So, you need to understand what is normal and what is not normal from solution experts. 

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

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

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.

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.

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.

I have used Celonis within the last 18 months.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We use this solution in the telecom sector for a number of things, such as multi-hop analysis and SLA breaches.

The documentation, multi-hop analysis, and SLA breaches are the most valuable features we have discovered. 

The Process Query Language (PQL) native language used in Celonis needs improvements. It has most of the process-related functions but we have queries from clients that cannot be done in PQL.

Most of the KPIs are done in PQL, if we could have support for other languages, such as Python. We could directly configure our KPIs using these other languages and it would be a great help.

When I am uploading data to Celonis it sometimes fails and this should be fixed in an upcoming release.

I have been using this solution within the last 12 months.

This solution is stable and reliable. It has all the security features needed.

I have found Celonis highly scalable, they have various connectors which we can directly download and connect to many source systems.

We have approximately 100 people using this solution in my organization and we plan to increase usage. We are targeting US and European markets, we definitely have a good pipeline for Celonis at the moment.

The technical support is responsive but I would not rate them as being very good because sometimes they get stuck and are not able to provide a reliable solution. There are times they do not understand the exact issue. They respond quickly but when we connect with them, we are faced with these issues.

The initial setup was complex. The full deployment took approximately three months, this includes all the connectivity and KPI configuring. If you have a more basic setup it could take approximately two months.

The solution requires an annual license. There is room for improvement because it is priced for organizations and not for individuals. For an individual, it would be too expensive for them to use it.

We evaluated a couple of software solutions before we chose Celonis for our clients because it has most of the features we were looking for, it is quite user-friendly, and it has an Azure configure.

I have evaluated and have a good understanding of Minit and UiPath.

I would recommend Celonis to anybody who wants to enter into process mining space. My advice would be to have as much SQL knowledge as possible. They should learn SQL first before using this solution, it will make everything a lot easier.

I rate Celonis a seven out of ten.

I used Celonis in the previous company that I have just left. They were using it in the cloud. It was integrated with SAP and all the transactional data from SAP, such as the purchase orders, purchase requisitions, approvals, inventory, and so forth. 

It provided more visibility. For example, it was used across North America, and while analyzing the purchase orders, we realized that the deviation on the price was particularly high in Mexico. We noticed that the deviation of the price was because the price was not updated in SAP. It should have been updated in the master data. As a result, the vendor had a huge deviation for the particular part numbers, which was causing problems for the purchase order approval. Celonis provided that visibility, and it was really easy to see where the deviation was. The report showed in red all those price changes that were happening in the transactions. So, it was very easy to pinpoint the issue.

It is a very strong and very powerful solution. You can seamlessly process a large amount of data. It doesn't take a long time to do the analysis. It provides the analysis matrix, which basically includes all the analytics that need to be performed for the transactions. You can drill down really fast within graphics. You can double click and drill down to specific areas for more details. It is very intuitive and easy to use.

Similar to what SAP is doing with S/4HANA, Celonis should allow business users to create their own analytics tab. In my previous organization, business analysts were the only ones who were actively building these reports with Celonis, whereas SAP platforms are now allowing the business users to create their own reports with graphics and all other things based on the data that is presented. This is one thing that Celonis needs. Currently, just the technical teams are doing that.

Sometimes, when we were looking at five years of data, it used to take up to 3 seconds. It wasn't bad, but we had to wait a little bit. It probably also had to do with the server.

I don't know if it can be used on mobile devices. If not, that will be the way to go. They should mobilize it to allow people to see these reports on their mobile devices.

I have been using this solution for around a year.

It is really stable.

It is a tool that can be used in corporations for all decision-making. It can be used by directors and managers to do their analysis. Having said that, I don't know if it could be used on mobile devices such as a mobile phone or iPad. In my previous company, they didn't allow us to have direct access on our mobile devices, but they had started opening to that.

In terms of users, generally, managers and above used this solution. Its users included purchasing manager, the person who handled the customer service management, and the person who handled the service for parts. 

Their plan was to keep using it and use it more extensively. Unfortunately, not everybody was buying that because they were overwhelmed with a lot of stuff going on. If this tool is provided to all management positions, it could be a very good tool for key performance index and making decisions about how to approach things and so forth. They had the intention, and Celonis was the tool that they decided to use for this kind of analysis.

I didn't interact with their technical support.

Everybody was using a tool for reporting. Some were using BI, and there were some who were using Tableau. Some people just directly used Excel. They were exporting data into Excel and just doing it themselves, which is a lot of work because you have to create your own analytics, formulate the algorithms, filters, and so forth.

BI, Tableau, and other tools are comparable to it. You could do probably the same thing with BI or perhaps Tableau, but you will have to build them from scratch. Celonis is out of the box. The graphics and analytics were very convenient because they were already relevant to SAP. It was intuitive, which was a very good thing.

Celonis has all the built-in features that can give you all the information you need with a large amount of data. With all other applications, you have to do analysis, formulate the algorithms, create filters, and so forth to get to that point. So, obviously, time is the essence. After you have implemented Celonis, it can be used extensively in different sections of your organization without any issue.

There were standard tables in SAP that were used for things like purchase order constructions. So, the business analyst took all standard tables and dropped them into Celonis. After that, based on the criteria, we would go over and drill down to make sure that Celonis had the correct amount, quantities, and vendors, and nothing was missing. We worked through that process for the complete transactional data for many weeks to make sure that the totals were correct and matching SAP. We had to query the data and then analyze it to make sure that the totals match. After that was done for all transactions, we just declared that it was integrated completely and was ready to use. There were some pieces that were enhanced in SAP to accommodate Celonis and give the correct data according to those enhancements.

In terms of duration, it took a little more than expected because of COVID. It took about a year. We were doing it through Team meetings, and the business analyst from Celonis was in Germany. We had to meet very early in the morning with them. We met once or twice a week to go over all processes.

We had a business analyst from Celonis working with the manager of a specific area. The purchasing manager was in charge of helping us to go through the end-to-end process to make sure that we cover all processes related to purchasing, such as assets purchasing, supplies purchasing, and so forth. All different end-to-end processes needed to be fulfilled with Celonis reporting. My role was to help them to reconcile the totals to make sure that they were matching.

From a technical standpoint, it provides an ROI.

I was not involved in that, but I am sure it was cost-effective for them. That's why they made the decision to take it.

I would rate Celonis a nine out of ten.

We use the solution in our financial department for involving purchases and other similar types of processes.

The solution has benefited our organization by having more transparency. A lot of times organizations are not aware of exactly how the process is in reality, the fact that they can map out the process and then see how the process is working in real-time is a huge benefit. 

I have found the automatic mapping of the processes themselves to be a valuable feature. The fact that this solution is agnostic and you can map a process across multiple systems almost automatically from the moment that you have the data mapped out, makes our lives much easier.

In the solution, you have access to how the process is, and are able to integrate that with other systems that allow you to make changes to the process itself, this process can be improved.

Additionally, instead of having, for example, an end-to-end experience within the solution, it is very nice for the analysis parts, but when it comes down to action, then we need to step out of it.

I have been using the solution for the last 18 months.

The solution is very stable.

I have found the solution really easy to scale up. We have 16 people using the platform that includes data engineers and data scientists. At the moment we do not plan to increase the usage.

The technical support has been good in my experience. They normally respond within a couple of hours, sometimes it takes one or two days depending on the issue.

We previously used Marvin, we switched because this solution is enterprise-grade. Marvin requires a lot of time-consuming tasks in terms of mapping out the processes, while in this solution it comes like that out of the box. It is almost a plug-and-play solution, once you have that already.

The installation can be difficult but it depends. It varies quite a lot from organization to organization and depending on the level of maturity on their data. Most organizations need to spend a significant amount of time working on the data itself before we can actually purchase the solution. This drawback is not directly related to the solution itself.

We did the deployment and it requires limited personnel, one data engineer and data scientist would be fine. The duration of the deployment depends a lot on the organization, the process of analysis, and on how many systems that process goes through. It can take anywhere between two to six months.

Our implementation strategy comes down to the data first. We look at the quality of the data, the consistency of the data across multiple systems. If we can identify unique fields that allow us to connect the data, then after that, we need to think about what is the processes with the most inefficiency in theory from the organization side. We also conduct a lot of interviews with the business users. Once we think we found the most inefficient process, then we apply the solution to it and we analyze it black and white, if that is the reality or not.

Evaluating the price of the solution can be a difficult question. It is all about the business case and the return of the investments. That is typically how we also see this type of solution. It depends very much on the return. The entry-level is focused on enterprise size companies, for the SMB segment is it is out of their range. It is definitely expensive.

We pay for a recurring license. There are a couple of add-ons that have a price that can be useful for you as an organization or not, but they have some additional modules. We are also talking about daily consumption, the more data you process on the solutions platform, the more you need to pay. You also need to keep that in mind.

I would like to see a different license model for the solution in the future.

My advice to those looking to implement the solution is to first look at the data, this is the first step and the biggest mistake. If there is no data or the data maturity is quite slow, then you cannot use this solution as a platform.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned is most often the reality or the level of understanding of how an organization works is very different from reality. The power of this solution is that black and white reality check on how the internal processes of the organization work.

I rate Celonis and eight out of ten.

We are using Celonis in our process mining operations to investigate our processes performance and take actions accordingly in business core processes such as order to cach(O2C), accounts receivable and payable, purchase to pay, warehouse processes. Our primary goal work with Process Excellence and discover process improvement and automation needs.

We've just started to use the solution.

The solution really is a leader of the industry in the concept of process mining. They are very strong on this scope. It's their most valuable aspect.

The solution offers a very good user interface. With the dynamic interface on offer, the development of processes and dashboards is easy.

Technical support - both from the company and from the consultants we hired - is quite good.

The solution is very stable. It doesn't seem to have any bugs.

It would help if they had more integration flexibility and automation features. 

We've been using the solution for about one year at this point. It hasn't been too long.

The solution seems to be very stable. I haven't witnessed any bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Overall, its performance and reliability are quite good.

it is well enough.

We have a consulting company in our county that assists with technical support. They are giving support, however, Celonis is also giving support, as we need. They've allowed us to also speak directly to them if we run into issues. It is good that Celonis has enough partners in our region and that they are open to helping us directly. Therefore, we've been satisfied with the level of support on offer, and the options we have when it comes to getting assistance.

Firts you need to install some integrator components to take data from your ERP or third party applications. You need also have third-party application consultants to complete those setups as well. But at the experts have experience how to do it well.

We brought in consultants for the initial implementation. They helped us roll everything out.

We're customers and end-users of the product.

We're using the latest version of the solution at this time.

In general, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Overall, we've been quite happy with the product and its capabilities so far.