Bayer Group’s Timo Peters on expanding process mining use

Timo Peters, Bayer Group's Center of Expertise (CoE) lead for Process Mining, said process mining can be democratized across a broad range of business users. But first there are a few things on your to-do list to make that vision a reality. 

Peters will be a speaker at Celosphere 2022 and share his top tips for running a CoE. Peters, CeloCoE Champion EMEA, built Nokia's CoE and is currently accelerating Bayer's efforts.

We caught up with Peters ahead of Celosphere to talk shop, democratizing process mining, use cases, data governance and achieving value to name a few topics. Here are the highlights of our chat. 

Expanding the process mining base. Peters is enthusiastic about the concept of citizen process miners where data on processes is democratized to business users. "We want more people on the business side using process mining with their own dashboards," said Peters. "Process mining should be used in a native way without a technical background or special knowledge." 

• Celosphere 2022: Showcasing innovation, building relationships, making an impact

• Celosphere 2022: You’re going to see groundbreaking progress on process mining technology

• Celonis Celosphere 2022 live in Munich: In-person event focused on process mining, execution management and business transformation

To make process mining more native, views could be customized to the type of user. "I'd expect different people to have different ways of looking at process improvements. Business users would be looking at processes and how to achieve faster financial results. A technical person may look more at the data and reporting," explained Peters, who noted that to achieve those views data would have to be prepared for usage from the beginning.

Key performance indicators are critical. Peters said process improvement always includes a mix of KPIs, but financial metrics are the best way to illustrate how value is delivered. "From a general point of view, it's always important to generate ROI. Value and returns will become more important given the volatile economic outlook," he said. "You need to demonstrate you can generate savings."

Precursors to scale data and process usage in the enterprise. Peters said it's critical that enterprises focus on data quality and their data models as a baseline. With quality data governance, companies can not only deliver value quickly, but expand use cases. "Getting data quality to the right level is often underestimated," said Peters. "People think that you can get a connector, and everything will work magically, but data quality is important if you're targeting end-to-end processes and sharing information across the value chain."

"Change management is also important so people are getting value and using process mining," he added. Change management and planning are critical roles for CoEs. 

Use cases to start. Peters said his favorite processes are order-to-cash and source-to-pay because impact cash flow. "There are other use cases like automation that have a big impact but longer time horizon," said Peters. By starting with use cases with quick time-to-value, it is easier to make the case for scaling process mining.

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.