What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have done a certification in this product. So, I used it for six to eight months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a highly stable product. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service and support has been fine.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
There is some support required for the deployment of Celonis.
What other advice do I have?
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.
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
