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Celonaut Spotlight: Amanda Rein, Value Engineer
From crafting code to creating customer value, Amanda Rein has transformed her career as a Celonis Value Engineer. From a Software Engineer to a frontline innovator, Amanda embodies Celonis' spirit of driving value and fostering growth.
Since joining less than a year ago, in November 2023, she's already achieved remarkable milestones. Join us as Amanda walks us through her journey from university studies to championing customer-focused solutions at Celonis.
Amanda Rein
Value Engineer
Can you describe your typical day as a Value Engineer at Celonis?
Value Engineers wear a lot of hats, so every day looks different. I spend most of my time with my primary customers but also hop around to help out with teammates’ customer engagements, as our whole team really takes a collaborative approach to managing Celonis’ Pharma and Life Sciences NAM customers. Value Engineers are responsible for orchestrating the customer relationship across all processes and groups within the enterprise, so I could start my day with an enablement session to an accounts payable team and end my day with a demo on the AI capabilities within Celonis with the IT service management team at the same customer. Value Engineers swap between building in the customers’ Celonis environments, demoing our capabilities, connecting customers with the Celonis experts for more specific troubleshooting or feature requests, and spearheading short sprints that focus on capturing value with the Celonis platform.
What inspired you to transition from a Software Engineer to a Value Engineer?
I have always had a passion for problem solving, studying Electrical and Computer Engineering in university and focusing on strengthening my technical skillset immediately out of college by accepting a job within the AI space at AWS. While I found the logic and mathematical problem-solving around building out a platform for housing AI algorithms and training different models fine-tuned to customers’ needs, I didn’t feel fulfilled without getting to work directly with the customer on the implementation side. I was able to see from my position as someone maintaining this active platform that many of our customers weren’t using it correctly, were churning, and were facing errors but my role was dedicated to the designing, implementing, and testing portion of the SDLC. The divide between me and the customer at a large software company like Amazon had me looking for new opportunities where the roles were less siloed, and I was drawn to Celonis for offering the Value Engineering role. As a Value Engineer, I get to work alongside the customer to fit the platform to their needs and make sure it delivers value to their organization and aligns with their strategic priorities. I’m grateful for the opportunity to leverage my technical skillset in a targeted, impactful way that is driven by my customers' needs.
How does your background in software engineering influence your work as a Value Engineer?
Coming from a software engineering background, it is second nature for me to jump into the Celonis platform on the fly with a customer to help them troubleshoot issues, decode error messages, and tweak PQL. I’m able to articulate to the customers' IT teams how the platform will fit into their tech stack and how it can integrate with other services seamlessly, understanding their concerns around encrypting data across those connections or pipeline latencies for example. With my specialization in AI, I can understand howthe Process CoPilot is doing what it is doing in order to confidently assure customers how their data is being used with the LLM for example. When it comes to the ML Workbench within the Celonis platform, I feel comfortable jumping in and pulling training a machine learning model to do some transformations on customers’ data within Celonis and push that back to a Celonis dashboard. In short, I feel that I’m able to deliver more as a Value Engineer with my software background as I can really understand the “how” behind our suite of capabilities.
What do you find most exciting about your current role at Celonis?
I’ve been a Value Engineer for six months now, and I’m still excited by the role’s breadth and depth. The breadth of the role means that I get experience in both pre-sales and post-sales engineering, in both engaging with the business strategically and enabling the daily users of the application, in building analyses within Celonis to surface value on customers’ data and in driving them to do the same in a hands-on workshop. I feel that my growth is in all directions, especially when I am crossing into different business processes: accounting, supply chain, even clinical trials in my specific industry vertical. It’s fascinating to work alongside a customer to see how they might even save lives by analyzing their processes in Celonis that directly impact patients, with the goal of shortening the time to return a life-saving therapy to a patient. The depth also comes from getting to focus on a few customers and really spend time with them, get to know how they do business and what they care about.
What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced since joining Celonis, and how did you overcome them?
Since process intelligence is a relatively new concept, it can sometimes be a challenge to explain why a customer needs it and especially when you start to add in all of the entangled processes into one view with object-centric process mining. Celonis is so much more than just process mining; it is really a platform for process intelligence. Since stepping into this role, my focus has been on fine-tuning my messaging around this to help customers truly understand the depth of Celonis' technology. To add another layer of complexity: Celonis is sold across processes, so upon joining I had to get up to speed on what customers would care about in business processes like accounts payable, accounts receivable, supply chain, clinical trial management, etc. It felt like drinking from a firehose trying to digest all of this information and then funnel it to customers in a way that made sense, but I love the challenge and feel lucky to have so many great role models on my team.
Can you share a specific project or achievement at Celonis that you are particularly proud of?
A recent achievement was presenting Celonis for Supply Chain with the AI capabilities alongside Divya Krishnan, VP of Product & Solution Marketing, at the Celonis City Collaborative in NYC! It was a fantastic experience meeting so many Celonis customers and learning from someone like Divya who plays a large role in the success of Celonis and is an energetic, captivating speaker. I feel honored to have been trusted to give the demo being only six months into my Celonis career, and I felt supported the entire way by my leadership and other Value Engineers.
What advice would you give to someone looking to make a similar career transition?
Transitioning from a software engineer into a value engineer requires you to shift your perspective towards value. As a Value Engineer, you approach all of your work in terms of how much value it can bring to your customers (though value can be measured in many ways such as in financial savings, productivity, or sustainability). You won’t invest your time building something unless you can tie it to business value, and that frame of mind really helps you to be intentional about spending time on high-impact activities. You also need to lean into your soft skills moving from such a technical role into a customer-facing role. Publicly available courses on LinkedIn for accounting principles, business practices, project management frameworks, and public speaking were instrumental for me. At the end of the day, you need to thrive off of connecting with people because you will be spending the majority of your days making relationships with your customers and earning their trust — you can’t be successful without it.
How do you see the future of value engineering evolving, and what role do you think Celonis will play in that evolution?
I know that my time as a Value Engineer will continue to look different based on my customers needs, but I do believe that the Value Engineering organization itself will likely evolve at Celonis as we continue to fine-tune and enhance our engagement model with customers over time. There is always going to be a need for this kind of technical, customer liaison who is primarily focused on the health of our customer relationships. By combining pre-sales and post-sales engineering, we avoid disconnect as we convert prospects into new customers and can follow through on our promises with them.
👩🚀 Amanda went to the University of Virginia, where she graduated with a B.S. in Computer Engineering as a Jefferson Scholar and Rodman Scholar. During her university studies, she completed a summer internship at a Prague-based tech startup called GoOut as their first intern, helping them to engineer their website to be a hub of real-time data on cultural events and concerts in Europe. Amanda also interned with AWS as a software engineer in the Computer Vision organization, where she started full-time after college. Moving out to Seattle to join Amazonland, Amanda spent her time building out her technical skillset in software and AI solutions before moving to New York City to continue work on the Content Moderation services at AWS. Amanda joined Celonis in November of 2023 to move into customer-facing engineering sales. Outside of her time at Celonis, she enjoys spending time with friends exploring the city, traveling, and spending time with family in Florida and Texas. —————————————————————————————————————-
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