Celonis Workforce Productivity enables end-to-end process, employee experience improvement

Celonis formally announced Workforce Productivity, a solution powered by Task Mining, at Celosphere 2022, the company's annual user conference in Munich, Germany.

Task mining and process mining are complementary technologies that, when used together, create a complete picture of how work flows across an organization. Process mining collects data moving through transactional systems, such as ERP, CRM and SCM systems. Task Mining collects data on process steps performed on employee desktops and laptops.

According to Celonis, 75% of the time spent executing business processes happens outside of transactional systems. So having visibility into tasks executed on the desktop is crucial for identifying and fixing end-to-end process inefficiencies.

Workforce Productivity was one of several product and acquisition announcements Celonis made during the event. The company also debuted Business Miner™, Process Sphere™ (a capability of Celonis EMS built on a novel type of process mining technology called object-centric process mining), the Emporix Commerce Execution Platform, Accounts Receivables Apps and the acquisition of Sailfin Technologies, a leader in end-to-end accounts receivable (AR) solutions.

Workforce Productivity is available for Celonis customers now.

Desktop visibility crucial for end-to-end process improvement

In addition to Celonis’ own stats, Everest Group’s 2022 report, Task Mining Playbook, showed that productivity tools (Microsoft Excel, Outlook, Word, etc.) account for 80% of the top 5 most-used applications and employees reported spending ~1.5x more time using these apps than enterprise applications. Respondents said that more than 60% of their work days are spent across productivity apps, which is 30% higher than CIOs expect.

Having so many process tasks occur on the desktop creates several problems for organizations:

1. Lack of process and employee experience visibility: First, failing to analyze desktop tasks creates a huge blind spot in understanding how your processes actually work. Second, it leaves you with an incomplete picture of how your employees actually work and whether their day-to-day experience is a positive one. Constantly switching between applications or copying and pasting data from one application to another, can be a frustrating and time consuming experience that hurts productivity and the overall employee experience.

2. Business functions are becoming larger: Even in medium-sized organizations, hundreds of employees are often responsible for an end-to-end process or even a single process area. The scale of modern business processes means that traditional analysis methods, such as shadowing sessions or data sampling, no longer provide an accurate view of workforce behavior. In addition, these older, more isolated techniques often fail to reveal relevant insights, such as how different teams operate.

3. Workforce behaviors change quickly: When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and the world went into lock down, entire companies went from being in the office one day to working from home the next. This dramatic workforce shift meant new systems, methods and had to be created and implemented almost overnight. One-off efforts to analyze workforce behavior can’t effectively drive continuous productivity and experience improvement during times of such rapid change.

Celonis Workforce Productivity optimizes process efficiency and employee experience

Celonis Workforce Productivity powered by Task Mining captures desktop data using the Celonis Task Mining client.

The data is then integrated into a data model where the application usage and user behavior data is analyzed to see where inefficiencies occur and solve for the aforementioned problems.

1. Full workforce visibility across entire departments: Workforce Productivity can see how work happens across large teams and over a meaningful period of time. The latest version of Workforce Productivity can collect information from up to 2,500 concurrent users and store 6 months of historical data. This is a significant increase over earlier versions which were limited to ~250 users and 30 days of historical data. Workforce Productivity provides full visibility on how users spend time across Windows and web applications, including productivity tools like Excel.

2. Comparing process insight across teams: Different teams face different challenges, and they use tools in different ways. Celonis Workforce Productivity Team Insights lets companies compare insights between subgroups and customize employee experience improvements by team.

3. Stability as businesses grow and evolve: Celonis has updated Workforce Productivity to expand data collection, add live event monitoring and reduce CPU usage by up to 50%. The improved performance allows customers to dynamically monitor and see how external factors, such as the pandemic, and internal factors, such as a new software release, affect workforce performance.

BP and Celonis innovation partnership demonstrates the power of desktop process analysis

Although not part of the Celosphere announcement, BP implemented Celonis Task Mining as part of an earlier co-innovation partnership to break down time-consuming tasks, such as invoice processing, into specific steps.

“With Celonis we can see for example that invoice processing takes us an average of 27 minutes,” said Claire Hourigan, Head of Business Process Management and the Process Mining Center of Excellence at BP. “But what I’m really interested in, is what actually goes into that 27 minutes. What were the manual hops out of SAP and into a spreadsheet or website to get the information needed to post that invoice,” she added.

“Task Mining has filled in all of those manual gaps for us,” Hourigan said. “It’s helped to really push a big funnel of innovation and automation into our team.”

Get Task Mining training at Celonis Academy

You can learn more about Celonis Task Mining Basics from Celonis Academy.

Celonis Academy offers over 300 courses to help you learn the process mining, process management, and execution management skills that today’s employers are looking for…all online and all for free.

More from Celosphere 2022:

• Celonis announces next-generation, MRI process mining technology with Process Sphere™

• Celonis brings the power of process mining and execution management to the masses with Business Miner™

• Celonis Accounts Receivable apps enable data-driven AR management

• Celonis EMS Connector for Power BI supercharges Microsoft’s business reporting platform with process intelligence

Bill Detwiler

Senior Communications Strategist and Editor Celonis Blog

Bill Detwiler is Senior Communications Strategist and Editor of the Celonis blog. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, where he hosted the Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET’s popular online show. Bill is an award-winning journalist, who’s covered the tech industry for more than two decades. Prior to his career in the software industry and tech media, he was an IT professional in the social research and energy industries.