Celonis' Guilherme Bujes: A look at Brazil's potential

Guilherme Bujes, Celonis' Brazil and Latin America leader, said that the region has unique industries and growth possibilities that make it a greenfield for process mining and execution management.

Bujes said Celonis is building out its Brazil operations in the first half with investments in Mexico, Colombia and Chile on deck. Celonis has key customers in Brazil already with Petrobras, Embraer and iFood.

I caught up with Bujes to talk about Latin America plans. Here are a few of the takeaways.

Latin America is a systems transformation story in many ways. Since joining Celonis in January, Bujes has been making the rounds with customers and the key theme is that enterprises across multiple industries are trying to make fragmented and dated systems more efficient. "Brazil businesses are running on rigid and fragmented legacy solutions with inefficient processes," said Bujes. "We can be a help to improve the quality of information and get more out of old versions of ERP and homegrown applications. It is an expensive, long project to update ERP systems with low returns."

Why Brazil first? Bujes noted that Brazil is more than a third of Latin America's gross domestic product and has "huge potential for growth." Brazil also has a diversified set of industries led by financial services, manufacturing, retail and oil and gas. Brazil also has a strong base of consumer product goods and agribusiness companies that feed about 25% of the world population with just 5.6% of the total landmass

Building the team. Bujes said he is hiring local account executives, consultants and customer value managers primarily focused in Brazil and then expanding in the region. We are bringing to Celonis people with solid industry backgrounds to help our customers, with the use of our solutions, reveal and fix the inefficiencies they can’t see.

Processes are global. While Brazil and Latin America will have nuances unique to the region, the process excellence and techniques apply globally. "The Celonis approach applies globally as processes are a universal language," says Bujes. "We can take many examples of process excellence and apply them to Brazil and Latin America."

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief (former)

Larry Dignan is the former Editor in Chief of Celonis Media. Before joining Celonis, he was Editor in Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine.