Why Accenture is embedding Celonis for data-driven decisions

Accenture's move to embed Celonis' execution management and process mining technology into its platforms and implementations highlights how businesses are moving toward data-driven decision-making.

In a release, Accenture said it will embed Celonis' process mining and execution management tools into its myConcerto and SynOps platforms. The partnership aligns Accenture's data-driven consulting, which aims to create greater value for clients, with Celonis' technology that targets and realizes value.

Accenture and Celonis have already collaborated on more than 100 client engagements. I caught up with Phillip Hazen, senior managing director, Intelligent Platform Services at Accenture, and Gene Reznik, senior vice president, Ecosystem & Industries at Celonis, to see where the partnership and process mining can go.

Here are the key points:

The problem to solve. Hazen said that Accenture has been moving toward data-driven consulting for years and has been using Celonis to help clients get more value out of their enterprise systems. "The data-driven approach of Celonis has been at the heart of understanding the bottlenecks with their applications and processes," said Hazen.

Accenture and Celonis have a broad partnership. Reznik noted that the alliance between the companies is a natural fit that combines business process outsourcing and process mining along with services. See Accenture Execution Management System apps.

The enterprise architecture landscape. Hazen said customers are about 20% into their journey to move enterprise systems-of-record to the cloud. Celonis' process mining technologies span those systems and can make best-of-breed strategies more efficient. "We recognize and understand execution gaps and help them accelerate and derive value," explained Reznik.

Process mining adoption. Hazen said process mining and data-driven execution is in the "top of the second inning with a long way to go." However, adoption is accelerating,” said Reznik. "The journey to full digital business is in the early innings, but the next set of innings is accelerating in terms of the value being created," he said.

What's ahead? Hazen said software integrations are available now between Accenture platforms and Celonis tools. He added that the two companies will look to "deepen industry-specific capabilities and functions" with "pre-built and automated process mining models." Over time, these targeted capabilities will be industrialized.

Target industries. Hazen said that financial services, logistics and supply chain represent large opportunities for a data-driven approach. Reznik said sustainability will be another key area. "Sustainability is a huge focus for us because customers will be optimizing around carbon footprint and taking a carbon-based view of business processes," said Reznik.

Together, these two companies have the potential to uniquely push forward the larger business trend towards digitization, and help companies turn insights into instant, data-driven and automated actions. Both Hazen and Reznik emphasized that we’re still at the beginning of this journey, but the possibilities ahead are exciting.  Read the press release here.

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.