Process Intelligence: The CIO's secret weapon for unlocking value

CIOs are under intense pressure to deliver massive digital transformation initiatives with limited resources under tight time constraints. Boards of directors are placing a high priority on deploying generative AI as fast as possible so their organizations don’t lose competitive advantage. Meanwhile, organizations running SAP ERP platforms have until 2027 to upgrade from ECC and R3 to S/4HANA, when support will end. These are just two examples of the many challenges CIOs have on their plate.

Enter process intelligence, a data-driven approach that’s revolutionizing how CIOs navigate these challenging transformations. By providing a fact-based view of how systems and processes flow within organizations, it enables more informed decision-making at both strategic and tactical levels.

Here’s how it works. The platform uses process mining and augments it with business context to give companies a living digital twin showing the way their business operates. It’s system-agnostic and without bias, which means companies share a common language for understanding and improving how their business runs, connecting them to their processes, their teams to each other, and emerging technologies to their business. Meaning employees and teams can better collaborate to optimize their business within and across processes. Process intelligence can be applied to every process in every industry, allowing processes to scale to the level of your ambition, and drive the results we all know are possible.

Consider a large system migration challenge. Process intelligence helps CIOs tackle the complexity by providing clear visibility into current operations. For instance, a major alcohol distributor uses process intelligence to create detailed heat maps of their requirements across regions and geographies, an analysis that would have been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming using traditional methods. Process intelligence provides a common language between stakeholders by objectively documenting how work flows through the organization, helping managers to make data-driven decisions.

The technology also provides common language for the often-challenging gap between business and IT teams. During an upgrade, when custom code often needs to be retired and bespoke processes need to be standardized, business units may resist change With facts and data, this decision making becomes simpler.

When it comes to generative AI initiatives, many organizations rush in without a proper understanding of their processes and risk implementing a large language model that doesn’t produce the ROI the business expects. Deployments are often extremely complex, involving specialized, high-performance hardware, rollout of use cases, change management and lengthy training cycles to help people adjust to new ways of working. Process intelligence identifies where slowdowns and bottlenecks occur so managers can speed up and, where appropriate, simplify the deployment process.

Real-world success stories demonstrate the technology’s impact. HARMAN, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, leveraged process intelligence for business case planning during its transformation journey and currently uses it for fit-gap, custom code analysis and master data cleanup. As a result, accelerating progress towards completing its system migration. Another large consumer products company employed process intelligence to monitor user adoption during hyper care phases of their implementation, quickly identifying and resolving challenges in order execution and fulfillment. The end result? Happier customers.

The benefits of process intelligence extend beyond technical considerations. Project Management Offices (PMOs) find that process intelligence helps define clearer program scope, reducing the risk of scope creep and budget overruns. Systems integrators can bid more accurately on projects and complete them faster when they have detailed process insights at their disposal.

Celonis is the global leader in process mining and process intelligence. Well-known brands such as PepsiCo, Uber, ExxonMobil, Diageo, Mars, Calor Gas, Pfizer   and many more employ their platform for system transformation and execute initiatives faster.

To find out how Celonis can help your organization, visit here.