4 must-know Execution Management themes from Celonis Labs

Celonis Labs is out with a handful of topics and concepts for the Celonis Execution Management System in the future.

The unit was formed in September 2021 to examine technologies with at least a 10-year time frame. With its first Celonis Labs Journal, a biannual publication, Eugenio Cassiano, Senior Vice President of Celonis Labs, said his group of innovators and technology researchers has big plans ahead.

"We believe that being a generational company, which we believe we are, it's important as well to be a category leader, but also anticipating trends, anticipating what's next, what's new for the community and for all the market," said Cassiano.

Here's a crib sheet of the key themes in the Celonis Labs Journal. You can download the PDF for a deeper dive.

Collaboration networks will extend process, execution excellence.

Today, Celonis' Execution Management System is largely based on process excellence and automation within a company by tapping into a series of systems of record. But there’s a lot more to be done between companies with collaborative execution. Celonis Labs is working on leveraging EMS for interconnections between companies, said Eugenio Cassiano, Senior Vice President of Celonis Labs. In the future, companies can join a business network in EMS that'll connect internal systems as well as a process view of all involved parties and systems. "The next big thing of Celonis becoming that performance company will be to create network externalities," said Cassiano.

Maximilian Schrupp, Senior Technology Researcher, Celonis Labs, elaborated:

We had the question before of integrating new kinds of software into Celonis and I think it's not just software that's out there. It's really about digitizing everything that's relevant to a process, whatever that means. Those are new types of data sources, but also new types of actions that you can actually build on top of processes that can be network related or whatever.

Zero Trust will encourage collaboration.

Zero Trust security is a key area for Celonis Labs research largely because it can improve collaboration across industries even among companies that are rivals. Cassiano said transparency into systems will be critical, but shared execution will require a different security model. Companies should be able to share only the information that adds value to the ecosystem. For instance, a company can be transparent that it has a relationship with a partner, but not reveal the value in a deal.

He added:

Companies may not want to share data because that data might be used against them. Imagine if the same network had two competitors. You can be transparent by leveraging a concept like zero trust sharing. Zero Trust sharing will be important in the context of collaboration, which creates value. You create an advantage for the companies that are part of the network. They will get value out of it. It's not only value on their own process, but it's value across the value chain.

Real world data and context will be a game changer.

While Execution Management can make a big difference with data from Oracle, SAP and Salesforce systems (e.g. system of record data sources), there is a lot more unstructured data that can improve end-to-end processes. Cassiano said it will be key to capture the data from non-classical process mining events such as tracking cargo ships and containers. "Process events will also be real-world events that you can observe. It can be a machine, it can be a human via computer vision, and it should be available in the context of the EMS," he said.

The goal is to leverage all of the data sources that were created by digitization and normalizing them to improve processes. "What we need to do in Celonis is capture those data sources from the real world and recognize, and translate events into the domain of business users," said Cassiano.

Other data sources of interest will be environmental conditions (as well external factors such as events impacted by covid, for example Shanghai port and big impact with global supply chain)  and how they impact processes. Celonis Labs will be researching how to model external events and their impact on processes. 

The addressable market of Execution Management will expand.

Cassiano said Celonis Labs views the Execution Management user as anyone that are involved with a process. Today, that person is a data scientist, analyst or process miner involved with a Center of Excellence. In the future, the Execution Management user will encompass business users. "We want to go directly to all the people that are in the process itself," said Cassiano. "We want to actually provide a Celonis that will reach every user in the world, in their application context."

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.