Tag: CelosphereLive

Virtual conference best practices: 2020 in review

Wow, it’s been over two months since my last post. I took a long break over the end of the year since there wasn’t a lot going on that inspired me to write, and we were in conference hiatus. Now that (virtual) conferences are ramping up again for 2021, I wanted to share some of the best practices that I gathered from attending — and in one case, organizing — virtual conferences over 2020. Having sent this information by email to multiple people who were organizing their own conferences, I decided to just put it here where everyone could enjoy it. Obviously, these are all conferences about intelligent automation platforms, but the best practices are applicable to any technical conference, and likely to many non-technical conferences.

In summary, I saw three key things that make a virtual conference work well:

  1. Live presentations, not pre-recorded. This is essential for the amount of energy in the presentation, and makes the difference between a cohesive conference and a just a bunch of webinars. Screwups happen when you’re live, but they do at in-person conferences, too.
  2. Separate and persistent discussion platform, such as Slack (or Pega’s community in the case of their conference). Do NOT use the broadcast vendor’s chat/discussion platform, since a) it will disappear once your conference is over, and b) it probably sucks.
  3. Replays of the video posted as soon as possible, so that people who missed a live session can watch it and jump into the discussion later the same day while others are still talking about it. Extra points for also publishing the presentation slides at the same time.

A conference is not a one-way broadcast, it’s a big messy collaborative conversation

Let’s start with the list of the virtual conferences that I wrote about, with links to the posts:

What I saw by attending these helped me when I was asked to organize DecisionCAMP, which ran in late June: we did the sessions using Zoom with livestreaming to YouTube (participants could watch either way), used Slack as a discussion platform (which is still being used for ongoing discussions and to run monthly events), and YouTube for the on-demand videos. Fluxicon used a similar setup for their Process Mining Camp: Skype (I think) instead of Zoom to capture the speakers’ sessions with all participants watching through the YouTube livestream and discussions on Slack.

Some particular notes excerpted from my posts on the vendor conferences follow. If you want to see the full blog posts, use the tag links above or just search.

Camunda

  • “Every conference organizer has had to deal with either cancelling their event or moving it to some type of online version as most of us work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these have been pretty lacklustre, using only pre-recorded sessions and no live chat/Q&A, but I had expectations for Camunda being able to do this in a more “live” manner that doesn’t completely replace an in-person event, but has a similar feel to it. They did not disappoint: although a few of the CamundaCon presentations were pre-recorded, most were done live, and speakers were available for live Q&A. They also hosted a Slack workspace for live chat, which is much better than the Q&A/chat features on the webinar broadcast platform: it’s fundamentally more feature-rich, and also allows the conversations to continue after a particular presentation completes.”
  • “As you probably gather from my posts today, I’m finding the CamundaCon online format to be very engaging. This is due to most of the presentations being performed live (not pre-recorded as is seen with most of the online conferences these days) and the use of Slack as a persistent chat platform, actively monitored by all Camunda participants from the CEO on down.”
  • “I mentioned on Twitter today that CamundaCon is now the gold standard for online conferences: all you other vendors who have conferences coming up, take note. I believe that the key contributors to this success are live (not pre-recorded) presentations, use of a discussion platform like Slack or Discord alongside the broadcast platform, full engagement of a large number of company participants in the discussion platform before/during/after presentations, and fast upload of the videos for on-demand watching. Keep in mind that a successful conference, whether in-person or online, allows people to have unscripted interactions: it’s not a one-way broadcast, it’s a big messy collaborative conversation.”
  • Note that things did go wrong occasionally — one presentation was cut off part way through when the presenter’s home internet died. However, the energy level of the presentations was really high, making me want to keep watching. Also hilarious when one speaker talked about improving their “shittiest process” which is probably only something that would come out spontaneously during a live presentation.

Alfresco

  • “Alfresco Modernize didn’t have much of a “live” feel to it: the sessions were all pre-recorded which, as I’ve mentioned in my coverage of other online conferences, just doesn’t have the same feel. Also, without a full attendee discussion capability, this was more like a broadcast of multiple webinars than an interactive event, with a short Q&A session at the end as the only point of interaction.”

Celonis

  • “A few notes on the virtual conference format. Last week’s CamundaCon Live had sessions broadcast directly from each speaker’s home plus a multi-channel Slack workspace for discussion: casual and engaging. Celonis has made it more like an in-person conference by live-broadcasting the “main stage” from a studio with multiple camera angles; this actually worked quite well, and the moderator was able to inject live audience questions. Some of the sessions appeared to be pre-recorded, and there’s definitely not the same level of audience engagement without a proper discussion channel like Slack — at an in-person event, we would have informal discussions in the hallways between sessions that just can’t happen in this environment. Unfortunately, the only live chat is via their own conference app, which is mobile-only and has a single chat channel, plus a separate Q&A channel (via in-app Slido) for speakers that is separated by session and is really more of a webinar-style Q&A than a discussion. I abandoned the mobile app early and took to Twitter. I think the Celosphere model is probably what we’re going to see from larger companies in their online conferences, where they want to (attempt to) tightly control the discussion and demonstrate the sort of high-end production quality that you’d have at a large in-person conference. However, I think there’s an opportunity to combine that level of production quality with an open discussion platform like Slack to really improve the audience experience.”
  • “Camunda and Celonis have both done a great job, but for very different reasons: Camunda had much better audience engagement and more of a “live” feel, while Celonis showed how to incorporate higher production quality and studio interviews to good effect.”
  • “Good work by Celonis on a marathon event: this ran for several hours per day over three days, although the individual presentations were pre-recorded then followed by live Q&A. Lots of logistics and good production quality, but it could have had better audience engagement through a more interactive platform such as Slack.”

IBM

  • “As I’ve mentioned over the past few weeks of virtual conferences, I don’t like pre-recorded sessions: they just don’t have the same feel as live presentations. To IBM’s credit, they used the fact that they were all pre-recorded to add captions in five or six different languages, making the sessions (which were all presented in English) more accessible to those who speak other languages or who have hearing impairments. The platform is pretty glitchy on mobile: I was trying to watch the video on my tablet while using my computer for blogging and looking up references, but there were a number of problems with changing streams that forced me to move back to desktop video for periods of time. The single-threaded chat stream was completely unusable, with 4,500 people simultaneously typing “Hi from Tulsa” or “you are amazing”.”
  • “IBM had to pivot to a virtual format relatively quickly since they already had a huge in-person conference scheduled for this time, but they could have done better both for content and format given the resources that they have available to pour into this event. Everyone is learning from this experience of being forced to move events online, and the smaller companies are (not surprisingly) much more agile in adapting to this new normal.”

Appian

  • “This was originally planned as an in-person conference, and Appian had to pivot on relatively short notice. They did a great job with the keynotes, including a few of the Appian speakers appearing (appropriately distanced) in their own auditorium. The breakout sessions didn’t really grab me: too many, all pre-recorded, and you’re basically an audience of one when you’re in any of them, with little or no interactivity. Better as a set of on-demand training/content videos rather than true breakout sessions, and I’m sure there’s a lot of good content here for Appian customers or prospects to dig deeper into product capabilities but these could be packaged as a permanent library of content rather than a “conference”. The key for virtual conferences seems to be keeping it a bit simpler, with more timely and live sessions from one or two tracks only.”

Signavio

  • “Signavio has a low-key format of live presentations that started at 11am Sydney time with a presentation by Property Exchange Australia: I tuned in from my timezone at 9pm last night, stayed for the Deloitte Australia presentation, then took a break until the last part of the Coca-Cola European Partners presentation that started at 8am my time. In the meantime, there were continuous presentations from APAC and Europe, with the speakers all presenting live in their own regular business hours.”
  • “The only thing missing is a proper discussion platform — I have mentioned this about several of the online conferences that I’ve attended, and liked what Camunda did with a Slack workspace that started before and continued after the conference — although you can ask questions via the GoToWebinar Question panel. To be fair, there is very little social media engagement (the Twitter hashtag for the conference is mostly me and Signavio people), so possibly the attendees wouldn’t get engaged in a full discussion platform either. Without audience engagement, a discussion platform can be a pretty lonely place. In summary, the GTW platform seems to behave well and is a streamlined experience if you don’t expect a lot of customer engagement, or you could use it with a separate discussion platform.”

Pega

  • “In general, I didn’t find the prerecorded sessions to be very compelling. Conference organizers may think that prerecording sessions reduces risk, but it also reduces spontaneity and energy from the presenters, which is a lot of what makes live presentations work so well. The live Q&A interspersed with the keynotes was okay, and the live demos in the middle breakout section as well as the live Tech Talk were really good. PegaWorld also benefited from Pega’s own online community, which provided a more comprehensive discussion platform than the broadcast platform chat or Q&A.”

Fluxicon

  • “The format is interesting, there is only one presentation each day, presented live using YouTube Live (no registration required), with some Q&A at the end. The next day starts with Process Mining Café, which is an extended Q&A with the previous day’s presenter based on the conversations in the related Slack workspace (which you do need to register to join), then a break before moving on to that day’s presentation. The presentations are available on YouTube almost as soon as they are finished.”
  • “The really great part was engaging in the Slack discussion while the keynote was going on. A few people were asking questions (including me), and Mieke Jans posted a link to a post that she wrote on a procedure for cleansing event logs for multi-case processes – not the same as what van der Aalst was talking about, but a related topic. Anne Rozinat posted a link to more reading on these types of many-to-many situations in the context of their process mining product from their “Process Mining in Practice” online book. Not surprisingly, there was almost no discussion on the Twitter hashtag, since the attendees had a proper discussion platform; contrast this with some of the other conferences where attendees had to resort to Twitter to have a conversation about the content. After the keynote, van der Aalst even joined in the discussion and answered a few questions, plus added the link for the IEEE task force on process mining that promotes research, development, education and understanding of process mining: definitely of interest if you want to get plugged into more of the research in the field. As a special treat, Ferry Timp created visual notes for each day and posted them to the related Slack channel.”

Bizagi

  • “The broadcast platform fell over completely…I’m not sure if Bizagi should be happy that they had so many attendees that they broke the platform, or furious with the platform vendor for offering something that they couldn’t deliver. The “all-singing, all-dancing” platforms look nice when you see the demo, but they may not be scalable enough.”

Final thoughts

Just to wrap things up, it’s fair to say that things aren’t going to go back to the way that they were any time soon. Part of this is due to organizations understanding that things can be done remotely just as effectively (or nearly so) as they can in person, if done right. Also, a lot of people are still reluctant to even think about travelling and spending days in poorly-ventilated rooms with a bunch of strangers from all over the world.

The vendors who ran really good virtual conferences 2020 are almost certain to continue to run at least some of their events virtually in the future, or find a way to have both in-person and remote attendees simultaneously. If you run a virtual conference that doesn’t get the attendee engagement that you expected, the problem may not be that “virtual conferences don’t work”: it could be that you just aren’t doing it right.

CelosphereLive 2020 — Day 3: extending process mining with multi-event logs and task mining

Traditionally, process mining is fed from history logs from a single system. However, most businesses aren’t run on a single system, and Celonis Product Lead for Discovery Sabeth Steiner discussed how they are allowing multi-event log process mining, where logs from multiple systems are ingested and correlated to do a more comprehensive analysis. This can be useful to find friction between parallel (inbound) procurement and (outbound) sales processes, or customer service requests that span multiple process silos. Different parallel processes appear in Celonis process discovery in different colors, and the crossover points between them highlighted.

Each of the processes can be analyzed independently, but the power comes when they are analyzed in tandem: optimizing the delivery time within an order-to-cash process while seeing the points that it interacts with the procure-to-pay process of the vendors providing materials for that order. Jessica Kaufmann, Senior Software Developer, joined Steiner to show the integrated data model that exists behind the integrated analysis of multiple processes, and how to set this up for multiple event logs. She discussed the different types of visualization: whether to visualize the different processes as a single process (by merging the event logs), or as multiple interacting processes. KPIs can also be combined, so that overall KPIs of multiple interacting processes can be tracked. Great Q&A at the end where they addressed a number of audience questions on the mechanics of using multi-event logs, and they confirmed that this will be available in the free Celonis Snap offering.

Another analysis capability not traditionally covered by process mining is task mining: what are the users doing on the desktop to interact between multiple systems? Andreas Plieninger, Product Manager, talked about how they capture user interaction data with their new Celonis Task Mining. I’ve been seeing user interaction capture being done by a few different vendors, both process mining/analysis and RPA vendors, and this really is the missing link in understanding processes: lack of this type of data capture is the reason that I spend a lot of time job-shadowing when I’m looking at an enterprise customer’s processes.

Task Mining is installed on the user’s desktop (Windows only for now), and when certain white-listed applications are used, the interaction information is captured as well as data from the desktop files, such as Excel spreadsheets. AI/ML helps to group the activities together and match them to other system processes, providing context for analysis. “Spyware” that tracks user actions on the desktop is not uncommon in productivity monitoring, but Celonis Task Mining this is a much more secure and restricted version of that, capturing just the data required for analyzing processes, and respecting the privacy of both the user and data on their screen.

Once the user interaction data is captured, it can be analyzed in the same way as process event log: it can discover the process and its variants, and trigger alerts if process compliance rules are violated. It’s in the same data later as process mining data, so can analyzed and exposed using the same AI, boards and apps structure as process data. Task Miner also captures screen snapshots to show what was actually happening as the user clicked around and entered data, and can be used to check what the user was seeing while they were working. This can be used to determine root causes for the longer-running variants, find opportunities for task automation, and check compliance.

He showed a use case for finding automation opportunities in a procure-to-pay process, similar to the concept of multi-event logs where one of those logs is the user interaction data. The user interaction data is treated a bit differently, however, since it represents manual activities where you may want to apply automation. A Celonis automation could then be used to address some of the problem areas identified by the task mining, where some of the cases are completely automated, while others require human intervention. This ability to triage cases, sending only those that really need human input for someone to process, while automatically pushing actions back to the core systems to complete the others automatically, can result in significant cost savings and shortened cycle time.

Celonis Task Mining is still in an early adopter program, but is expected to be in beta by August 2020 and generally available in November. I’m predicting a big uptake in this capability, since remote work is removing the ability to use techniques such as job shadowing to understand what steps workers are taking to complete tasks. Adding Task Mining data to Process Mining data creates the complete picture of how work is actually getting done.

That’s it for me at CelosphereLive 2020; you can see replays of the presentation videos on the conference site, with the last of them likely to be published by tomorrow. Good work by Celonis on a marathon event: this ran for several hours per day over three days, although the individual presentations were pre-recorded then followed by live Q&A. Lots of logistics and good production quality, but it could have had better audience engagement through a more interactive platform such as Slack.

CelosphereLive 2020 — Day 3: Process AI for automation

I started my day early to see Dr.Steffen Schenk, Celonis Head of Product Management, talk about the Celonis Action Engine and process automation. In short, they are seeing that because they integrate directly with core systems (especially ERP systems, that have their own processes built in), they can do things that RPA and BPM systems can’t do: namely, data-driven sense and act capabilities. However, these processes are only as timely as the data connection from the core systems into Celonis, so there can be latency.

He walked through an example of an order management process where he filtered SAP order data to show those with on-time delivery problems, due to order approval or credit check required, and created a query to detect those conditions in the future. Then, he created a process automation made up of system connectors that would be triggered based on a signal from that query in the future. In addition to system connectors (including webhooks), the automation can also directly call Celonis actions that might prompts a user to take an action. The automation can do branching based on data values: in his example, a customer credit block was automatically removed if they have a history of on-time payment, and that data was pushed back to SAP. That, in turn, would cause SAP to move the invoice along: it’s effectively a collaborative process automation between SAP and Celonis. The non-automated path sends a task to an order manager to approve or deny the credit, which in turn will trigger other automated actions. This process automation is now a “Skill” in Celonis, and can be set to execute for all future SAP order data that flows through Celonis.

Once this automation has been set up, the before and after processes can be compared: we see a higher degree of automation that has led to improving the on-time delivery KPI without increasing risk. It’s data-driven, so that only customers that continue to have an on-time payment record will be automatically approved for credit on a specific order. This is an interesting approach to automation that provides more comprehensive task automation than RPA, and a better fit than BPM when processes primarily exist in a line-of-business or legacy system. If you have an end-to-end process to orchestrate and need a comprehensive model, then BPM may be a better choice, but there’s a lot of interesting applications for the Celonis model of automating the parts of an existing process that the core system would have “delegated” to human action. I can definitely see applications for this in insurance claims, where most of the claim process lives in a third-party claims management system, but there are many decisions and ancillary processes that need to happen around that system.

This level of automation can be set up by a trained Celonis analyst: if you’re already creating analysis and dashboards, then you have the level of skill required to create these automations. This is also available both for cloud and on-premise deployments. There was an interesting discussion in the Q&A about credentials for updating the connected systems: this could be done with the credentials of the person who approves a task to execute (attended automation) or with generic system credentials for fully-automated tasks.

This was a really fascinating talk and a vision of the future for this type of process automation, where the core process lives within an off-the-shelf or legacy system, and there’s a need to do additional automation (or recommendations) of supporting decisions and actions. Very glad that I got up early for the 7:15am start.

I listened in on the following talk on machine learning and intelligent automation by Nicolas Ilmberger, Celonis Senior Product Manager of Platform and Technology, where he showed some of their pre-built ML tools such as duplicate checkers (for duplicate invoices, for example), root cause analysis and intelligent audit sampling. These are used to detect specific scenarios in the data that is flowing into Celonis, then either raising an action to a user, or automating an action in the background. They have a number of pre-configured connectors and filters, for example, to find a duplicate vendor invoice in an SAP system; these will usually need some customization since many organizations have modified their SAP systems.

He showed a demonstration of using some of these tools, and also discussed a case study of a manufacturing customer that had significant cost savings due to duplicate invoice checking: their ERP system only found exact matches, but slight differences in spelling or other typographical errors could result in true duplicates that needed more intelligent comparison. A second case study was for on-time delivery by an automotive supplier, where customer orders at risk were detected and signals sent to customer service with recommendations for the agent for resolution.

It’s important to note that both for these ML tools and the process automation that we saw in the previous session, these are only as timely as the data connection from the core processing system to Celonis: if you’re only doing daily data feeds from SAP to Celonis, for example, that’s how often these decisions and automations will be triggered. For orders of physical goods that may take several days to fulfill, this is not a problem, but this is not a truly real-time process due to that latency. If an order has already moved on to the next stage in SAP before Celonis can act, for example, there will need to be checks to ensure that any updates pushed back to SAP will not negatively impact the order status.

There was a studio discussion following with Hala Zeine and Sebastian Walter. Zeine said that customers are saying “we’re done with discovery, what’s next?”, and have the desire to leverage machine learning and automation for day-to-day operations. This drove home the point that Celonis is repositioning from being an analysis tool to an operational tool, which gives them a much broader potential in terms of number of users and applications. Procure-to-pay and order-to-cash processes are a focus for them, and every mid-sized and large enterprise has problems with these processes.

The next session was with Stefan Maurer, Vice President of Enterprise Effectiveness for AVNET, a distributor of electronic components. He spoke about how they are using Celonis in their procure-to-pay process to react to supplier delivery date changes due to the impact of COVID-19 on global supply chains. He started with a number of good points on organizational readiness and how to take on process mining and transformation projects. He walked us through their process improvement maturity lifecycle, showing what they achieved with fundamental efforts such as LEAN Six Sigma, then where they started adding Celonis to the mix to boost the maturity level. He said that they could have benefited from adding Celonis a bit earlier in their journey, but feels that people need a basic understanding of process improvement before adding new tools and methodologies. In response to an audience question later, he clarified that this could be done earlier in an organization that is ready for process improvement, but the results of process mining could be overwhelming if you’re not already in that mindset.

Their enterprise effectiveness efforts focus on the activities of a different team members in a cycle of success that get the business ideas and needs through analysis stages and into implementation within tools and procedures. At several points in that cycle, Celonis is used for process mining but not automation; they are using Kofax and UIPath for RPA as their general task automation strategy.

Maurer showed a case study for early supplier deliveries: although early deliveries might seem like a good thing, if you don’t have an immediate use for the goods and the supplier invoices on delivery, this can have a working capital impact. They used Celonis to investigate details of the deliveries to determine the impact, and identify the target suppliers to work with on resolving the discrepancies. They also use Celonis to monitor procure-to-pay process effectiveness, using a throughput time KPI based over time windows a year apart: in this case, they are using the analytical capabilities to show the impact of their overall process improvement efforts. By studying the process variants, they can see what factors are impacting their effectiveness. They are starting to use the Celonis Action Engine for some delivery alerts, and hope to use more Celonis alerts and recommendations in the future.

Almost accidentally, Celonis also provided an early warning to the changes in the supply chain due to COVID-19. Using the same type of data set as they used for their early delivery analysis, they were able to find which suppliers and materials had a significant delay to their expected deliveries. They could then prioritize the needs of their medical and healthcare customers, manually interfering in their system logic to shift their supply chain to guarantee those customers while delaying others. He thinks that additional insights into materials acquisition supply chains will help them through the crisis.

I’m taking a break from Celosphere to attend the online Alfresco Modernize event, but I plan to return for a couple of the afternoon sessions.

CelosphereLive 2020 – Day 2: From process mining to intelligent operations

I’m back for the Celonis online conference, CelosphereLive, for a second day. They started much earlier since they using a European time zone, but I started in time to catch the Q&A portion of Ritu Nibber’s presentation (VP of Global Process and Controls at Reckitt Benckiser) and may go back to watch the rest of it since there were a lot of interesting questions that came up.

There was a 15-minute session back in their studio with Celonis co-CEO Bastian Nominacher and VP of Professional Services Sebastian Walter, then on to a presentation by Peter Tasev, SVP of Procure to Pay at Deutsche Telekom Services Europe. DTSE is a shared services organization providing process and service automation across many of their regional organizations, and they are now using Celonis to provide three key capabilities to their “process bionics”:

  1. Monitor the end-to-end operation and efficiency of their large, heterogeneous processes such as procure-to-pay. They went through the process of identifying the end-to-end KPIs to include into an operational monitoring view, then use the dashboard and reports to support data-driven decisions.
  2. Use of process mining to “x-ray” their actual processes, allowing for process discovery, conformance checking and process enhancement.
  3. Track real-time breaches of rules in the process, and alert the appropriate people or trigger automated activities.

Interesting to see their architecture and roadmap, but also how they have structured their center of excellence with business analysts being the key “translator” between business needs and the data analysts/scientists, crossing the boundary between the business areas and the CoE.

He went through their financial savings, which were significant, and also mentioned the ability of process mining to identify activities that were not necessary or could be automated, thereby freeing up the workforce to do more value-added activities such as negotiating prices. Definitely worth watch the replay of this presentation to understand the journey from process mining to real-time operational monitoring and alerting.

It’s clear that Celonis is repositioning from just process mining — a tool for a small number of business analysts in an organization — into operational process intelligence that would be a daily dashboard tool for a much large portion of the workforce. Many other process mining products are attempting an equivalent pivot, although Celonis seems to be a bit farther along than most.

Martin Klenk, Celonis CTO, gave an update on their technology strategy, with an initial focus on how the Celonis architecture enables the creation of these real-time operational apps: real-time connectors feed into a data layer, which is analyzed by the Process AI Engine, and then exposed through Boards that integrate data and other capabilities for visualization. Operational and analytical apps are then created based on Boards. Although Celonis has just released two initial Accounts Payable and Supply Chain operational apps, this is something that customers and partners can build in order to address their particular needs.

He showed how a custom operational app can be created for a CFO to show how this works, using a real-time connectors to Salesforce for order data and Jira for support tickets. He showed their multi-event log analytical capability, which makes it much easier to bring together data sources from different systems and automatically correlate them without a lot of manual data cleansing — the links between processes in different systems are identified without human intervention. This allows detection of anomalies that occur on boundaries between systems, rather than just within systems.

Signals can be created based on pre-defined patterns or from scratch, allowing a real-time data-driven alert to be issued when required, or an automation push to another system be triggered. This automation capability is a critical differentiator, allowing for a simple workflow based on connector steps, and can replace the need for some amount of other process automation technologies such as RPA in cases where those are not a good fit.

He was joined by Martin Rowlson, Global Head of Process Excellence at Uber; they are consolidating data from all of their operational arms (drive, eats, etc.) to analyze their end-to-end processes, and using process mining and task mining to identify areas for process improvement. They are analyzing some critical processes, such as driver onboarding and customer support, to reduce friction and improve the process for both Uber and the driver or customer.

Klenk’s next guest as Philipp Grindemann, head of Business Development at Lufthansa CityLine, discussing how they are using Celonis to optimize their core operations. They track maintenance events on their aircraft, plus all ground operations activities. Ground operations are particularly complex due to the high degree of parallelism: an aircraft may be refueled at the same time that cargo is being loaded. I have to guess that their operations are changing radically right now and they are having to re-structure their processes, although that wasn’t discussed.

His last guest was Dr. Lars Reinkemeyer, author of Process Mining in Action — his book has collected and documented many real-world use cases for process mining — to discuss some of the expected directions of process mining beyond just analytics.

They then returned to a studio session for a bit more interactive Q&A; the previous technology roadmap keynote was pre-recorded and didn’t allow for any audience questions, although I think that the customers that he interviewed will have full presentations later in the conference.

#CelosphereLive lunch break

As we saw in at CamundaCon Live last week, there is no break time in the schedule: if you want to catch all of the presentations and discussions in real time, be prepared to carry your laptop with you everywhere during the day. The “Live from the Studio” sessions in between presentations are actually really interesting, and I don’t want to miss those. Today, I’m using their mobile app on my tablet just for the streaming video, which lets me take screenshots as well as carry it around with me, then using my computer for blogging, Twitter, screen snap editing and general research. This means that I can’t use their chat or Q&A functions since the app does not let you stream the video and use the chat at the same time, and the chat wasn’t very interesting yesterday anyway.

The next presentation was by Zalando, a European online fashion retailer, with Laura Henkel, their Process Mining Lead, and Alejandro Basterrechea, Head of Procurement Operations. They have moved beyond just process mining, and are using Celonis to create machine learning recommendations to optimize procurement workflows: the example that we saw provided Amazon-like recommendations for internal buyers. They also use the process automation capabilities to write information back to the source systems, showing how Celonis can be used for automating multi-system integration where you don’t already have process automation technology in place to handle this. Their key benefits in adding Celonis to their procurement processes have been efficiency, quality and value creation. Good interactive audience Q&A at the end where they discuss their journey and what they have planned next with the ML/AI capabilities. It worked well with two co-presenters, since one could be identifying a question for their area while the other was responding to a different question, leaving few gaps in the conversation.

We broke into two tracks, and I attended the session with Michael Götz, Engineering Operations Officer at Celonis, providing a product roadmap. He highlighted their new operational apps, and how they collaborated with customers to create them from real use cases. There is a strong theme of moving from just analytical apps to operational apps that sense and act. He walked through a broad set of the new and upcoming features, starting with data and connectivity, through the process AI engine, and on to boards and the operational apps. I’ve shown some of his slides that I captured below, but if you’re a Celonis customer, you’ll want to watch this presentation and hear what he has to say about specific features. Pretty exciting stuff.

I skipped the full-length Uber customer presentation to see the strategies for how to leverage Celonis when migrating legacy systems such as CRM or ERP, presented by Celonis Data Scientist Christoph Hakes. As he pointed out, moving between systems isn’t just about migrating the data, but it also requires changing (and improving) processes . One of the biggest areas of risk in these large-scale migrations is around understanding and documenting the existing and future-state processes: if you’re not sure what you’re doing now, then likely anything that you design for the new system is going to be wrong. 60% of migrations fail to meet the needs of the business, in part due to that lack of understanding, and 70% fail to achieve their goals due to resistance from employees and management. Using process mining to explore the actual current process and — more importantly — understand the variants means that at least you’re starting from an accurate view of the current state. They’ve created a Process Repository for storing process models, including additional data and attachments

Hakes moved on to talk about their redesign tools, such as process conformance checking to align the existing processes to the designed future state. After rollout, their real-time dashboards can monitor adoption to locate the trouble spots, and send out alerts to attempt remediation. All in all, they’ve put together a good set of tools and best practices: their customer Schlumberger saved $40M in migration costs by controlling the migration costs, driving user adoption and performing ongoing optimization using Celonis. Large-scale ERP system migration is a great use case for process mining in the pre-migration and redesign areas, and Celonis’ monitoring capabilities also make it valuable for post-migration conformance monitoring.

The last session of the day was also a dual track, and I selected the best practices presentation on how to get your organization ready for process mining, featuring Celonis Director of Customer Success Ankur Patel. The concurrent session was Erin Ndrio on getting started with Celonis Snap, and I covered that based on a webinar last month. Patel’s session was mostly for existing customers, although he had some good general points on creating a center of excellence, and how to foster adoption and governance for process mining practices throughout the organization. Some of this was about how a customer can work with Celonis, including professional services, training courses, the partner network and their app store, to move their initiatives along. He finished with a message about internal promotion: you need to make people want to use Celonis because they see benefits to their own part of the business. This is no different than the internal evangelism that needs to be done for any new product and methodology, but Patel actually laid out methods for how some of their customers are doing this, such as road shows, hackathons and discussion groups, and how the Celonis customer marketing team can help.

He wrapped up with thoughts on a Celonis CoE. I’m not a big fan of product-specific CoEs, instead believing that there should be a more general “business automation” or “process optimization” CoE that covers a range of process improvement and automation tools. Otherwise, you tend to end up with pockets of overlapping technologies cropping up all over a large organization, and no guidance on how best to combine them. I wrote about this in a guest post on the Trisotech blog last month. I do think that Patel had some good thoughts on a centralized CoE in general to support governance and adoption for a range of personas.

I will check back in for a few sessions tomorrow, but have a previous commitment to attend Alfresco Modernize for a couple of hours. Next week is IBM Think Digital, the following week is Appian World, then Signavio Live near the end of May, so it’s going to be a busy few weeks. This would normally be the time when I am flying all over to attend these events in person, and it’s nice to be able to do it from home although some of the events are more engaging than others. I’m gathering a list of best practices for online conferences, including the things that work and those that don’t, and I’ll publish that after this round of virtual events. So far, I think that Camunda and Celonis have both done a great job, but for very different reasons: Camunda had much better audience engagement and more of a “live” feel, while Celonis showed how to incorporate higher production quality and studio interviews to good effect, even though I think it’s a bit early to be having in-person interviews.

CelosphereLive 2020 – Day 1

I expect to be participating in a lot of virtual vendor conferences over the next months, and today I tuned in to the Celonis CelosphereLive. They are running on European time, with today’s half day starting at a reasonable 9am Eastern North American time, but the next two days will be starting at 4am my time– I may be catching some of the sessions on demand.

We had a keynote from co-CEO Alexander Rinke that included a short discussion with the godfather of process mining, Wil van der Aalst. I liked Rinke’s characterization that every process in every company is waiting to be improved: this is what process mining (aka process intelligence, depending on which vendor is talking) is all about in terms of discovering processes. Miguel Milano, Celonis Chief Revenue Officer, joined him to talk about their new Celonis Value Architects certification program. The fact that this announcement takes such a prominent place in the keynote highlights that there’s still a certain amount of expertise required to do process mining effectively, even though the tools have become much easier to use.

There were also some new product announcements, first around the availablity of their real-time data connectors. This is a direction that many of the process mining vendors are taking, moving from just an analytical process discovery role to more of an operational monitoring process intelligence role. Chief Product Officer Hala Zeine joined Rinke to talk about their connectivity — out of the box, the product connects to 80 different data sources — and their process AI engine that fits the data to a set of desired outcomes and makes recommendations. Their visualization boards then let you view the analysis and explore root causes of problem areas.

Their process AI engine does some amount of automation, and they have just released operational apps that help to automate some activities of of the workflow. These operational apps are an overlay on business processes that monitor work in progress, and display analysis of the state of (long-running) processes that it is monitoring. The example shown is an Accounts Payable operational app that looks at invoices that are scheduled for payment, and allows a financial person to change parameters (such as date of payment) in bulk, which would then push that update back to the underlying A/P system. Think of these operational apps as smart dashboards, where you can do some complex analysis for monitoring work in progress, and also push some updates and actions back to the underlying operational system. These first two apps are already available to Celonis customers in their app store, and tomorrow there will be a session with the CTO showing how to build your own operational app.

To finish off the day we had two product demos/discussions. First was JP Thomsen, Celonis’ VP Business Models, giving a more in-depth demo of their Accounts Payable operational applications. He was joined by Jan Fuhr, Process Mining Lead at global healthcare company Fresenius Kabi, which collaborated on the creation of the A/P operational application; Fuhr discussed their process mining journey and how they are now able to better support their A/P function and manage cash flow. The sweet spot for these operational apps appears to be when you don’t have end-to-end management on your process with another system such as a BPMS: the operational app monitors what’s happening in any core systems (such as SAP) and replaces ad hoc “management by spreadsheet” with AI and rules that highlight problem areas and make suggestions for remediation. They’ve had some great cost savings, through taking advantage of paying within a specified time frame to receive a discount, and optimizing their payment terms.

Last up was Trevor Miles, Celonis’ head of Supply Chain and Manufacturing Solutions, talking about the supply chain operational application: obviously these operational apps are a big deal for Celonis and their customers, since they’ve been the focus of most of these first half-day. Process mining can provide significant value in supply chain management since it typically involves a number of different systems without an explicit end-to-end process orchestration, and can have a lot of exceptions or variants. Understanding those variants and being able to analyze and reroute things on the fly is critical to maintaining a resilient suppy chain. This has been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, where supply chains have been disrupted, overloaded or underused, depending on the commodity and the route.

Process mining is used to generate a digital twin for the supply chain, which can then be used to analyze past performance and use as a point of comparison with current activities. The Celonis operational app for supply chain is about closing the gap between sensing and actions, so that process mining and simulation isn’t just an analytical tool, but a tool for guiding actions to improve processes. It’s also a tool for bridging across multiple systems of the same time: many large organizations have, for example, multiple instances of SAP for different parts of their processes, and need to knit together all of that information to make better decisions.

Not quite social distancing…

They finished up with a discussion in the studio between Hala Zeine, co-CEO Bastian Nominacher and CTO Martin Klenk, covering some of the new announcements and what’s coming up in the next two days. I’ll be back for some of the sessions tomorrow, although likely not before 8am Eastern.

A few notes on the virtual conference format. Last week’s CamundaCon Live had sessions broadcast directly from each speaker’s home plus a multi-channel Slack workspace for discussion: casual and engaging. Celonis has made it more like an in-person conference by live-broadcasting the “main stage” from a studio with multiple camera angles; this actually worked quite well, and the moderator was able to inject live audience questions. Some of the sessions appeared to be pre-recorded, and there’s definitely not the same level of audience engagement without a proper discussion channel like Slack — at an in-person event, we would have informal discussions in the hallways between sessions that just can’t happen in this environment. Unfortunately, the only live chat is via their own conference app, which is mobile-only and has a single chat channel, plus a separate Q&A channel (via in-app Slido) for speakers that is separated by session and is really more of a webinar-style Q&A than a discussion. I abandoned the mobile app early and took to Twitter. I think the Celosphere model is probably what we’re going to see from larger companies in their online conferences, where they want to (attempt to) tightly control the discussion and demonstrate the sort of high-end production quality that you’d have at a large in-person conference. However, I think there’s an opportunity to combine that level of production quality with an open discussion platform like Slack to really improve the audience experience.