CELONIS and EMPORIX combine process orchestration and process mining to fundamentally transform businesses

We asked Arnaud LARTIGUE, Director of Value Engineering at CELONIS to tell us more about process mining and the EMPORIX orchestration engine.

Engineering techniques: How did you learn about process mining and join CELONIS?

Arnaud LARTIGUE: I started in process analysis 25 years ago years. At the time I was in consulting and I was doing paper process analysis. But one day, I discovered process mining during my technology monitoring work and I fell in love with the concept. If the solution had existed when I started, my career would have been very different !

Before joining CELONIS three years ago, I was first a customer, then a partner. As I knew the product well, CELONIS hired me when the French subsidiary began to develop.

I am now director of Value Engineering. In our field, value engineers are the people who build the pre-sales promise and deliver it.

How CELONIS leverages AI for the process mining ?

I am not an AI specialist, but I participated in setting up the joint laboratory between Atos and Google in 2019. AI-based technologies have now been mature for at least five years and solutions exist on the shelf. Generative AI is therefore only the tip of the iceberg. I see that companies have taken up the subject, in particular to reinvent chatbots which are no longer based on decision trees and are finally able to offer relevant answers.

At CELONIS, we did not wait to integrate AI, but like everyone else, we gave it a boost by releasing our own co-pilot, capable of answering any question from our users about their processes. This is currently being tested by around twenty customers around the world.

The tool is efficient because, unlike general public generative AI, it has access to transactional information from the company’s internal processes, therefore a real gold mine.

The real strength of the tool is that it is capable of “ read the processes », to draw the indicators and make them understandable to any user, from the operator to the CEO.

But to be operational for the customer, the co-pilot must first be refined. What’s impressive is that it barely takes ten days. !

Concretely, what are the use cases ?

There are a lot of them! Let’s take the example of accounts payable. The user can ask a simple question: what are my payment terms with this supplier ? Rather than looking for the answer in the ERP¹which can take a long time, the response is obtained immediately.

Here is another example, which directly impacts field operators. We are working with two telecoms players in France on fiber installation, a task which involves a multitude of repetitive field operations. You should know that each change of box requires human intervention. However, one in two times, there is a problem : premises not accessible without a basket, lost door key, etc., and you have to go back.

We help operators identify problems in advance in order to anticipate the technician’s visit, because each visit is extremely expensive in terms of time spent and equipment mobilized. From a financial point of view, the benefits are immediate. Since these operations are subcontracted to companies paid on a fee-for-service basis, each act avoided is a saving. Finally, it is also the guarantee of better customer satisfaction, which is the most important thing.

Concretely, we allow operators to identify all possible scenarios, taking into account the multiple pieces of information already collected during past events. : type of building, customer profile, geographical area, etc. All this information allows the AI ​​to make predictions, which is ultimately the goal of any good AI. : anticipate problems before they arrive.

Can you tell us about your process orchestration solution developed with EMPORIX ?

There are many areas where the automation of processes that are read in parallel need to be orchestrated, using orchestration engines. However, that of EMPORIX is specifically designed to process large volumes of transactions.

Let’s take the example of e-commerce: what happens when you order on a large online platform and a product is no longer in stock ? A robot informs the warehouse that the product is missing, warns the customer, gives another delivery date and performs a multitude of actions in parallel, in real time. The management of these processes is then entrusted to orchestration platforms.

It turns out that this concept which comes from e-commerce also applies to traditional commerce, but also to industry, particularly to the supply chain. And we know how manufacturers are currently encountering problems related to their supply chain. However, by reading these processes, we are able to find the origin of the problems and define the right orchestration models.

Smarter process management then becomes essential. By harnessing the power of the CELONIS process intelligence platform, the EMPORIX orchestration engine then enables businesses to rethink the way processes work. Orchestration is becoming truly intelligent, especially thanks to AI, which is one of the tools to really approach operational excellence, improve customer experience and ensure that businesses can operate even when the supply chain is disrupted.

¹ Enterprise resource planning, or Integrated management software package