Top takeaways from World Tour 2022 Houston

Celonis kicked off its World Tour 2022 Houston stop with a keynote, customer panels and a healthy dose of information sharing and best practices.

The following takeaways are gathered from World Tour Houston customers and speakers in keynotes, panels and hallway chats. World Tour 2022 kicked off in the Bay Area with a keynote, Q&A with Celonis Co-CEO Alex Rinke and data on the returns of Celonis Centers of Excellence.

• Change management is critical to deploying process mining and there's a bit of psychology involved in convincing users to try something different. One customer has hired a change management leader with a background in psychology to examine the human behavioral issues with deploying new processes.

• Investments in Execution Management tend to be smaller and more frequent as processes scale. Celonis President Chris Donato said enterprises can see returns in four months. Donato said the investment cadence for Celonis is very different than ERP.

• IBM's Scott Layton, Vice President of Global Finance Transformation, said inflation is a huge theme that impacts wages, input costs and margins. Ultimately, inflation impacts culture. "Costs are rising everywhere," he said.

• Enterprises are using Celonis EMS to examine as-is operating models and work toward to-be operating models. A large oil-and-gas customer has created a digital unit focused on transforming the supply chain.

• One customer said that automating processes with Action Flows made change management easier.

• Supply chain disruptions and high costs for all modes of transportation have been top of mind among Celonis customers. Process efficiency is seen as a way to mitigate some of those supply chain issues.

• Aging ERP systems are hampering transformation efforts and Celonis is being used to ride on top of those applications to provide real-time visibility and connect disparate systems and applications. Process mining is also providing data and insights to make ERP consolidations go more smoothly.

• A large oil and gas customer is building models to spot process inefficiencies and categorize them as quick wins and longer projects. Operational expense and working capital are the two core value metrics for this company.

• Companies are beginning to look at indirect partner and supply networks to track processes as well as advance sustainability goals.

• Process efficiency and digital transformation efforts are blending together to improve working capital as well as customer experience. "There has been value financially obviously, but there's value in being able to redesign processes," said one customer, who was most interested in changing customer experiences with process efficiency. "The opportunity is with process redesign. It's a blank canvas at this point in time."

Celonis World Tour 2022: Everything you need to know

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.