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AmerCareRoyal CIO: Why Celosphere is important for us to attend
Celosphere 2022 will be the first time Jeff DeSandre, CIO at AmerCareRoyal, attends Celonis’ annual user conference. The IT veteran is looking forward to networking with the Celonis community and using the knowledge he and his team learns at the event to further amplify the value his company gets from Celonis EMS.
AmerCareRoyal began using Celonis in 2020 and started with the order-to-cash (O2C) process. Since then, the use of Celonis within the manufacturer of disposable products for the food service and other industries has expanded as the company moves away from their SQL Server data warehouse. In DeSandre’s words, Celonis has become an “operational dashboard” for the company.
Celonis is our “tool for continuous improvement.” That’s how DeSandre described the process mining and execution management system during a recent interview. In the runup to Celosphere 2022, DeSandre spoke with Tom Smith, Analyst with Acceleration Economy Network, about how his company uses Celonis and why he’s excited about the upcoming event.
DeSandre told Smith he had two goals for Celosphere:
“I would say it’s really getting our team embedded into the community, and two, it's really understanding and talking with other customers and learning how we can continue to evolve the technology,” he said.
The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for readability.
Celonis is AmerCareRoyal’s tool for continuous improvement
Tom Smith: How long has AmerCareRoyal been a Celonis customer and can you tell our audience a bit about your use cases with the Celonis technology please?
Jeff DeSandre: So I came here in 2019, and by the end of 2020, we brought in Celonis. And the reason we brought in Celonis was 100% around the business process modeling, right? When I got here in 2019, we had not even integrated the first three companies that made up AmerCareRoyal.
So what we were looking to do with Celonis was to model it over our ERP data, and our ERP system is not one of the usual suspects, so there's not a pre-setup model. So we worked with the Celonis team, and we were able to model our data, our ERP data into Celonis.
And we used that really to understand our business process. It was really reverse engineering our business process. And then what we gleaned from it was very fascinating in that we started with just one process, which is order-to-cash, and we were shocked at the number of touchpoints that it takes in order to get an order entered and out the door.
So we brought it in to utilize as a business process modeling tool. It's become much more than that. What we realized quickly was, and when we were going into the screen looking at the process, we were able to answer everyday business questions in near real time because Celonis already had all the data. So we ended up using it more as an operational dashboard than we did just from the pure process model.
Tom Smith: That's not a typical scenario that I've heard before. And I think one of your comments there, you were shocked at how many touchpoints there were. Just the fact that you were able to identify what all of those are, see all of them, identify them, that seems like a real value that was delivered there, correct?
Jeff DeSandre: Absolutely. I think that it really is our tool for continuous improvement to really help us know where that fits, right? What the tool gave us is we could go down, and we do. We drill down to an individual order and we can tell how many minutes it's spent at a phase or the amount of time it sat at a particular hold code.
Which is very powerful, right? Because when you add up all that data, that is time and effort. And really, it helps us baseline so when we go and make system improvements, we can then utilize Celonis to actually show the net improvement that we've achieved by making system and process changes.
Celosphere 2022: Learning, sharing and community networking
Tom Smith: Can you tell us how many Celospheres have you attended or will this be your first?
Jeff DeSandre: This will be my first. I did attend a roadshow in New York and I was very intrigued by that and I was happy to meet a lot of different partners there, but this is the first Celosphere, so I'm very excited about that.
Tom Smith: What's your hope going in? What do you hope to get out of [Celosphere]? Why is it important for a customer like yourself to attend?
Jeff DeSandre: I think for us it's twofold, right? We're migrating away from our traditional SQL Server data warehouse and we're really moving much more towards, like I said, daily operational work and dashboarding in Celonis.
So I have two primary objectives. One is a member of our team is coming along with me, and it's really going to allow him to really integrate into the Celonis community, the user community, and really understand how other people are using the tool.
For me, it's the same thing. I want to be able to network and talk to other people, because we're using two aspects of it. Well, we're certainly using it for a new product, which is going to be announced there, but we use it for process modeling and now we're using it for dashboarding. But one thing we haven't quite used yet is actioning, where we're actually actioning with Celonis. So we hope to learn a lot more about that while we're there.
So I would say it's really getting our team embedded into the community, and two, it's really understanding and talking with other customers and learning how we can continue to evolve the technology.
Learn more: See the full Celosphere 2022 agenda
Tom Smith: So really, you see a lot of benefit, if I could summarize, in the community getting together face to face and networking with peers to think about or to maybe conceive ideas on how you might act on all the quality data that you're pulling together at this point.
Jeff DeSandre: Yes.
How to amplify the Celosphere experience after the event
Tom Smith: And after the fact, I don't know if you've thought this far in advance, but how will you evaluate or how do you hope to put into practice what you learn at Celosphere? Have you given thought to that or how you would evaluate how successful the event is for you?
Jeff DeSandre: Well, I think two metrics. One metric is going to be how committed our technical lead that's coming there is to the platform, right? But more importantly is whenever we go to a conference we always complete a trip report. So what we do by that is it basically amplifies the experience to other people who didn't actually come or attend.
So we will be using the trip report where we learn different things and I always follow that up. I just got back from a large conference in Orlando, Florida and the trip report was the first thing I put out to my leadership team in the tech services department. And we will do the same thing here with the trip report. We will act on what we want, how we nurture any new relationships that we build, and also how we're going to convert the learnings into action.
Join us for Celosphere ‘22
Celosphere 2022 will be held live at Triebwerk München in Munich, Germany on November 9th and 10th. In-person attendees will have unlimited two-day access to the full Celosphere agenda, including; 50+ sessions from industry leaders, analysts and execution management experts, exclusive Celonis learning journeys, hands-on technical training, community networking opportunities, peer roundtable discussions, guest speakers and more. Virtual event-goers will be able to stream the conference keynotes and select breakout sessions and connect through virtual networking.
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