Episode 35

How to Succeed With Process Mining at a High Tech Company? With Pranay Jaiswal, Celonis

May 11, 2022
Mining Your Business

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Our special guest

Pranay Jaiswal

Pranay is a Customer Transformation Director at Celonis. He has over 13 years of experience in Technology and Business Transformation from his time working at Dell Technologies, where he was leading the Process Mining initiative regarding order management, frictionless, & automation including creation, hiring and operationalizing global value-based enterprises.

Pranay Jaiswal

featuring

Pranay Jaiswal

Customer Transformation Director

Episode Content

If you thought that large high tech enterprises are "process-proof", meaning that nothing can go wrong and their processes are designed to be as efficient as possible, you are wrong. Every process in the world can be enhanced, even processes at a tech company such as Dell. To discuss his journey with Dell where he lead the process mining initiative we host Pranay Jaiswal, now a director of customer transformation at Celonis. And not only that! He will also share his vision for a US market where process mining is still in diapers

Transcript

00:00
Patrick:
Do you know what time it is?

00:03
Jakub:
Time for Taco?

00:04
Patrick:
No. It's time for another episode of The Mining Your Business Podcast. A show all about process mining, data science, and advanced business analytics. How are you doing today, Jakub?

00:12
Jakub:
I'm doing quite nice, even without the taco.

00:15
Patrick:
I'm sorry about that. Pranay Jaiswal, Director of Customer Transformation at Celonis and former director of Process Mining at Dell joins us on the podcast today to talk about how process mining affects the high tech sector, what customer transformation looks like, and how the U.S. market is adopting a process mining approach. Let's get into it.

00:41
Jakub:
Hello, everyone. We are excited that you tuned in back in to yet another episode of the one and only podcast about process mining - Mining Your Business. We have brought you a very special guest today, someone who knows process mining from a perspective of an industry expert, but also from the process mining vendor itself. In today's episode, we bring to you Pranay Jaiswal, a director of Customer Transformation at Celonis and a former director of Process Mining and Data Science at Dell Technologies. Pranay, welcome to our show.

01:14
Pranay Jaiswal:
Thanks, Jakub.

01:16
Jakub:
It's really a pleasure to have you here and you know you've been for quite a while with with Dell Technologies. Last year you switched jerseys for the Celonis Team. What motivated you to make the jump? And in general, could you just tell us a bit about your own journey and how it all led you to Celonis?

01:36
Pranay Jaiswal:
Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me here. It's a real pleasure to be here and talking to both of you guys. So thank you so much. Well, if you think about it, I've spent most of my life in high tech. In a previous role, I was driving the process mining ecosystem for Dell Technologies and was able to drive end to end process visualization and transformation. And when I started this journey, you know, it's amazing to see a product and the people around Celonis and the potential this industry has. And they had an opportunity for me to have a wider impact in the high tech industry. And that's where I am right now. In my current role as a customer transformation advisor, my job is to advise high tech industry and supply chain around the best practice of COE or change management or operating model. So we are the advisors for our customers, including use cases, including everything. So yeah, we also do COE as a service in case if there is a desire for our customers to have us own end to end. And that was an amazing offer opportunity for me to pass.

03:08
Jakub:
So could you be somehow a little more specific how, for example, your day to day looks like? Because when I look at your title and your role, it's as director of customer transformation and you're mentioning that you're helping these high-tech companies with adoption, but also giving them some use cases. How would it look like for you when a customer approaches Celonis and they are interested in process funding in general and you jump in with your role? What do you actually do there?

03:39
Pranay Jaiswal:
So, I mean, I wear multiple hats, right? I mean, from selling a concept of process mining where people have never heard about process mining before. Now we have a pretty strong sales team. So a lot of times I don't have to do that work, but sometimes I, I come in as a sidekick to them and just help them take them through what good looks like, like show them the art of the possible of what you can be once you are process mining in EMS or Celonis ecosystem. What are the challenges it can overcome from multiple places and that's my personal passion is how do we drive transformation across your company? It's not about a few core process here and there or SAP. It's not about that. Process Mining is much, much bigger than just a few recipes or articles, whatever it is. Literally, it can transform your business. I'm very passionate about digital twin and creating a digital form of your business process. So sometimes I come in and uplevel the conversation a bit and then show them the art of the possible with process mining or EMS. I mean, we have been doing process mining for the last several years and EMS is really evolving and how do we really execute? How do we give you the tools and bells and whistles to really take the right decisions at the right time? And obviously, you can do that once you provide process mining capabilities across your core businesses and everything is great. Like you can put the tools in, you can put the people in. Like that's where the SOE concept comes in. So I start from there. And then my job is to make sure that we have a well-functioning COE with the right skill set of the people, with the right operating model that they can work across business and I.T. and other stakeholders to really drive value. So my day to day job is to coach our customers on what COE looks like. How should the COE run. What are the skills that you need in every COE?

05:53
Jakub:
Just for for listeners who might not be well known with the abbreviation COE, it stands for Center of Excellence, correct?

06:01
Pranay Jaiswal:
It is Center of Excellence. It is a team that is the glue between your business and I.T and everyone who in charge of enabling process mining and driving value from it or working with a business and saying, guys, here's a product, now go use it or these are the process opportunities you have seen from process mining. We would probably need a tweak here and there. So this team usually comprises of your technical guys, your product management, your solution architects, or sometimes customer value managers where they look at the value and then they work with the business in figuring out, OK, how should you change your process?

06:43
Jakub:
Now, you said some very interesting things that I would really like to pick up and probably the first one I would like to mention and ask you, you said that sometimes you basically approach these people and be at a C, level , be it a little lower level of middle management who's deciding whether or not to even adopt process mining in the first place? And you're going in front of these people and telling them you said that sometimes they don't even know what process mining is and that you kind of have to educate them to begin with. How do you do that, I wonder? How do you go in front of someone and tell them what the process mining is and why should they care?

07:27
Pranay Jaiswal:
Right. I mean, sometimes people think it's a dashboard or it's just another tableau or not that there's anything wrong with Tableau. But it is much more than a dashboard, right? Sometimes even though they think, yes, it is a process, you can you can stitch your process together but showing them how it can transform your business. What are the specific use cases that their peers have done in the industry or showing them the value that our other customers have extracted from process mining opens their eyes and we have a pretty massive customer base. More than a thousand customers. We have done more than 3000 deployments, a ton of success stories out there that they can take inspiration from. So all those things, plus we have an amazing solution engineering team that really takes sometimes takes their data and shows them real time. Look at this is how your process runs today. That opens their eye. Do a demo, show them the inefficiencies in their own process that gets them to say, ok, where do i sign up?

08:38
Patrick:
Now, it seems to me that you're very, very passionate about process mining. And generally you also said you speak to people who generally don't have a clue what process mining is and you're kind of leading them into it. I kind of want to go back to when you were that person who had no idea about process mining and kind of see what was your first reaction to seeing process mining in action? What was your first kind of idea about what it could be?

09:05
Pranay Jaiswal:
I have always been more of a process guy all my life, right? I remember my first job, maybe not first job, but probably second job in my life where I was tasked to do process mapping. Back in the days we did process mapping, right? So we had a bunch of consultants, we hired a bunch of consultants from an external firm. We went on this journey of mapping our process, very big task. I figured let's just map out all the sales process and supply chain process and services process. So we did that. We did 6 months on the role, I'm not kidding. Six months on the role meeting bunch of executives, people on the ground. You just, you just name it. We did. We sat in the rooms all day long. 15 hours, we map use Post-its and sticky tapes. You just name it. We will do all that fun stuff with our consulting partners and we mind all that data. We put that in one of the BPMN tools. And you know what? We had some good revelations, of course, but that data weren't stale right? After six months, technology changes, people changes, business changes. But no one will go back and say, oh, let me just redo that whole thing. So I always had that history of the good side of process mapping and then the bad side of process mapping, which is not really accurate. So again, when I first saw this, I think it was one of those conferences, I don't remember which conference it was but we ran into Celonis sometime. We brought them in, we did a very quick POC and then we saw it, and the room was like, guys, this is amazing. This is like showing us so many different areas of opportunities we were not aware of. So and that included a lot of our senior executives including myself and my bosses in the room. So I mean, we knew that this is really awesome and honestly, this was not taught by the business, and the Dell digital team drew Celonis into Dell and our CTO was very visionary. She was like, let me just do this for all of Dell because we love this capability, we love the technology behind process mining. And the rest is history where Dell has a pretty solid expanse of process mining and data science capability across their ecosystem.

11:51
Jakub:
Now staying a bit high level and like talking about tech or high tech in general, which I think is very interesting because when I think of tech companies, I think of like these let's, I don't even want to call them startups, but like these startups from the early 2000s or early nineties when they were coming up with new technologies and you were thinking of them, how can these guys have problems with processes? Because let's be quite clear. You know, our standard customers are usually these older European companies that have been working for tens or dozens of years already. And you can kind of expect that there can be some hiccups on their processes. What kind of problems are high tech companies even worried about when it comes to their business processes? Or are there some standard set of use cases that you're looking into?

12:43
Pranay Jaiswal:
So when I think about any company, right, so let's take an example of an high tech manufacturing company and any random company, you would have a front office, right? You would have a sales force, you have marketing people. Then you would have some sort of a coding mechanism or an order taking mechanism. Then you would have a supply chain that ships that product or services. Then you would have some sort of a payment taking mechanism to take cash from our customers. You would run invoices, you would have an AR and AP process in your business. Then you would have some sort of a customer service. So that in case anything goes wrong, you can support your customers and take care of them. So all these processes are fairly standard, not really standard, but it exists in a lot of these high tech manufacturing companies or any companies for that matter. Right? So that's where Celonis comes in. And the technology of process mining can be very, very applicable to really understand what is going on in that process. So then you talk about your, let's say, supply chain processes. We can bring process mining in to really show you the inefficiencies in your process. How are you procuring parts? How are you sending it to logistics? Are there delays between point A and point B? So that is fairly typical. You can think of another example within your customer service where if the customers are reaching out to you, how quickly are you resolving their issues? Or do you have issues of multi hop where you are just having that ticket change hands from one place to another place? How many times that hop happens and why is it happening? What can we do to reduce that? How can we reduce the cycle time so that we can resolve their issues much faster? You can do the exact same thing on the sales funnel, like, how does the sales cycle time looks like for your ecosystem? What are the conversions from a sales perspective? So all these use cases are fairly genetic in any high tech company. And I've not even talked about the back office where we play a very strong, right? We have an ARP process. We can do working capital optimization, we can look at discounts. So all those use cases are very standard in any industry and that's the power of Celonis and process mining is that it can be very, very applicable to any industry that you are going to.

15:14
Jakub:
I was thinking, let's get a little specific so we don't need to really to need any names or something. But are there some of your favorite use cases that you would bring to those high tech companies and tell them, let's say, your competitors achieve this and that with process mining, let's focus on that and what would be this use case and why would you choose it first?

15:38
Pranay Jaiswal:
One of the use cases that I'm seeing pop up of late these days is around sales. Now, this is not where we typically play in Celonis. We're very strong in back office, very strong and supply chain ideas and processes but this use case has a ton of traction right now, which a lot of our high tech manufacturing companies are focused on sales, sales enablement and just looking at sales team where their sales reps are spending time, how can we improve their productivity. I've seen it in multiple cases where we deploy process mining in their opportunity management lifecycle where it can just show amazing things around. OK how much time are they spending between cycles and what are the born to win rates looks like? Because that's probably not a good practice to have an opportunity comes in and just suddenly go from opportunity to win within a few hours. So some of the bad practices that happens there but that those are my favorites where it can have tremendous impact to your sales force and when you make your sales force much more productive, you're driving your top line and that's what my personal favorite use cases are around sales force and cycle time and really making their sales life better so that they can focus more time to their customers and drive more revenue.

17:20
Patrick:
Now, with your experience in the high tech industry, do you find yourself seeing the same types of use cases and issues at all the customers that you have? Or is it more that every single customer has a wide array of different topics or is it that every single client has wildly different problems that they're facing? Or is it more like they're all fairly similar, that they are dealing with the same stuff?

17:43
Pranay Jaiswal:
So that's a good question. I mean, you would see nuances, like I said in my previous answer, they are fairly set of standard use cases that exist everywhere. Right. Let's say working capital optimization that is one of the use cases that exists in every industry and then you have your customer services which exist everywhere. There is a lot of supply chain processes that we focus on. So that's where Celonis is moving towards is more verticalization. And you would start seeing that more and more where we are verticalizing our own Salesforce to still be focused on specific verticals. It could be technology, it could be public sector, it could be retail, could be finance where we have much more focus on that industry's use case, although there are some use cases that are that cuts across all industry. But you always see some nuances. I'm going to say that while the use cases are similar, you would see different priorities for different companies. So for instance, if you go work in a retail manufacturer, they totally care about supply chain. Whereas if you are working with a service provider, they care more about services part of it. So it depends on which company you work for and which company you're advising. They have different priorities and based on that, we provide tailored service to them.

19:25
Jakub:
I will definitely go through a little checklist like, you know, based on your own experience as heading and spearheading the implementation and also now basically being from the vendor side. So I will get to that a little later. For now, I also wanted to pick up on something you said, you mentioned at the beginning that you're somehow very passionate about this digital twin topic and like creating a digital twin of an organization in terms of process mining. And I think this might be actually for the first time we mentioned this term in our podcast, unless I'm mistaken, we might have discussed it with Marlon Dumas my one of the previous episode. But could you tell our listeners what the digital twin is and why should an organization care about creating one?

20:11
Pranay Jaiswal:
Yeah, well, I think we should talk about it. This can literally be its own podcast, I am very passionate about the digital twin subject. So every organization, like I said it before, has multiple different process. They have different value chains, we have a ton of data. I think the last time I was reading we had like 60 petabytes of data, or terabytes or setabytes, I don't know, I just ran out of terms these days, like a ton of data and data exists in silos, right? So you have sales data, you have orders data, you have back office, supply chain, everything is different. And they're all trying to do similar things. They are all trying to analyze data, drive data science and become more predictive on their own. And the magic happens when you provide process mining capability on it. You can really look at the process and then when you connect them end to end, it becomes a digital copy of your business process. And once you connect those things together, Celonis has a capability called multi event model. You have signal link where you can connect all of these things together that gives you literally an exit to your process, which is connected into it. And now you know that, OK, if I am getting this opportunity from my sales funnel right here, can I track this end to end and see how it moves through my sales channel and how it goes through my coding and ordering process? And then I'm shipping this product out, was it delivered or not? And then did I get that cash from the same customer? Did I pay that customer or not? So you have now an ability to track this end to end and once you have that digital piece together, you have more economy of scale. As you go through a data science experience, you can put your data scientists on it and then you can become more predictive. Whereas in the past you had those siloed boxes and everyone was trying to achieve the same goal, but in their own silos, which was hard to break. So this is liberating that experience and Celonis is trying to create that digital twin. Not really that's the only motive, but that's one of the side effect of Celonis is that you get a digital twin, you can use our own action flows to automate your process. Or we have an email workbench which is very, very strong that you can bring your data scientist in and then become more predictive and drive your use cases on it.

22:46
Patrick:
What are some of the biggest challenges you face? Because when I hear, you know, petabytes of data and putting that all into process mining and from all parts of the business, from what used to be silos, what are the biggest challenges in succeeding in displaying an an end to end process in this way, creating this digital twin?

23:05
Pranay Jaiswal:
So I think I'm going to take this question slightly differently. I think the challenges are multiple. There are some obviously technology challenges where you have to have a scalable platform to handle that kind of load. You need to have a scalable architecture, scalable vendor who can actually make this happen because you're talking about billions of dollars, right? So there's a technology aspect to it. Then there is a people aspect which is if not one of the important, but the most important thing is like you have let's say we did that, we did all that work let's say we made a digital twin. It's amazing. It's useless if you don't use it. You need to have people aligned with the strategic goal. Like I always talk about, why should we do this? How do we have an executive sponsor who has a very specific mission and goal to make things happen? So when I think about this question. I think about reasons why we don't get value from an initiative. And one of the biggest things by far that our customer tells us is having or not having an executive sponsor really makes or breaks the situation. Have to have a sponsor to be successful, have to have a specific goal, a key strategic goal that you're trying to hit and then obviously there is a technology aspect which I think we can get through it. But I think a lot of times people forget the people aspect and the change management aspect, which is very important, bringing people together, driving them towards the same cause because you can have an amazing car, but it's worthless if it doesn't run or if no one wants to drive it, right? So that's where I think the biggest challenge is, not the technology. I think we have smart engineers who can filter things out. We can put more platforms, we can do things. But it's the people that I think I've seen so many times where you've done all the hard work but no one is using it or they think it is a dashboard. So yeah, that is a tougher challenge in my opinion.

25:16
Jakub:
Yeah. I think this is one of the repeating themes of our podcast, which keeps coming back and back. Let's also hear your note on this. So let's say that you are this organization who already spent the effort, time, and money on creating a nice and up and running process mining platform, and yet the people are not using it. And I've been with customers like that. I think all of us have. What do you do?

25:43
Pranay Jaiswal:
Well, you start with best practices, right? So that's where I come in. I come in and because I've seen that story multiple times, I know what not to do. So, face it, former COE you need that. Find an executive sponsor. You find a strategic goal that everyone is aligned to. Then you train the people, enable them to use the right tools and then show them the way. I think if you do these things, you would be successful. You need to have a champion. You need to have someone who can drive this at the ground level with the technical team, with the business teams and have a COE, having a governance model in place where you are meeting with the executive sponsors on a weekly basis or not weekly, monthly basis. And then your ground team. You're working with a core team on a daily basis. Like having that governance structure, a COE that drives change, then an executive sponsor who is aligned with the COE with a target in mind. These are three things that I would say will drive value from any implementation. It's not just process mining. You just take any transformation effort, any digital transformation. You probably need these three things to be successful.

27:05
Jakub:
Now, Pranay,I think it was the last year when there was this commercial in US running around for Celonis that there is $10 million trapped in your business and Celonis can actually help you get it. Have you already been with a customer that actually got to this threshold where they actually got this and how did they do that?

27:45
Pranay Jaiswal:
It was before my time I joined the company. But I was literally in your shoes. I'm like, that's amazing. I'm seeing those ads from like Wall Street journals to everywhere. But that's the crazy part of process mining. You always see those shared values. No company runs at 100% efficiency. Now, I think some sort of like 20 or 30% is where the maximum threshold hurts. And then when you enable execution management system, that's when you open the floodgates and one of my customers who I will not name, but I loved her theory of hidden factories. She said it is like a hidden factory you never knew existed. Once you implement Celonis, suddenly you have all these pools of people that you thought, oh, they're working on some either non-value added activity or you're wasting time. But now you suddenly have this hidden factory that you never knew existed.

28:45
Jakub:
Wow, that's pretty cool. Actually, another question I would have is very specific for a U.S. market. And that would be like, since you actually talk to all these high tech companies, and I assume that most of them or most almost exclusively all of them are from the United States, how do they look at is this emerging BI technology coming from Europe? And it's not that long ago when Process Mining was still just a small thing. Nobody really cared. Now it's really has a lot of momentum, a lot of traction. But it still seems to me as an observer from the outside that in the US, this acceptance might be a little slower than in Europe just because of this geography, that it's just coming there a little later than it started in Europe. How do you look at this?

29:36
Pranay Jaiswal:
Yesterday I was with this pretty massive retail giant yesterday and and the CEO tells me, guys, Celonis sells itself, that's literally his words. Is it me, or does Celonis sells itself? But again, I don't see that a lot from these customers. But you're right, the culture of process and process efficiencies, it's literally a German and European culture. It's very strong in the roots. And I have tremendous respect for that. Obviously, I've spent most of my life in process, that's why. But if you come to U.S., that culture is changing. I can see that culture of process is coming in because any time you go and say, give me a tool and show me a value and I can make you run better, get you more money, save you more billions of dollars, people will people will say yes. It is common sense. So over the last several decades, United States had been the driver of innovation like they were the ones who are like driving new businesses, coming up with amazing ideas. So it was always the birthland of innovation, not saying Europe is not. But if you look at all the high tech companies that were born in US, they were pretty much ahead.

31:10
Pranay Jaiswal:
And then you bring best of both worlds. You bring the process and that culture from Europe. And then you merge with the innovation that comes in U.S. and that becomes magic, that becomes the best of both worlds. But you have innovation and efficiency ,that's amazing, right? So I mean, the culture is changing. I can totally see that the way we are growing in North America is tremendous. Celonis itself is growing 100% over the year, every single year for the last several years. And I can totally see that trend going forward. So yes, the culture is probably changing and for the good.

31:47
Patrick:
Now is that just the difference in culture is that one of the biggest differences between the EU and US or do you see any other differences and maybe their adoption or the way of how in your line of work and helping them transform. Is there like a difference that you see between these two markets?

32:06
Pranay Jaiswal:
So I mean, it goes back to the people comment that I made. Sometimes you get pushback from the customer, right? Sometimes they go, yeah, what is the point of this? But you would not run into the same probably challenge in in Germany where they have a pretty straight culture of, OK, we need to be more efficient. But sometimes you get that in US, but again, if you find the right balance of, show them the value, show them the reasons why we are doing this, how can it make their life easier? And that's one of my biggest lines: "I'm going to make your life easier." So I show them the value and then they will they will change.

32:58
Patrick:
And what about actually data privacy? Because I know this is a big thing in the EU for us and also specifically Germany, that privacy and data protection and things like that are very, very big and not as much in the US. Do you see some sort of difference there?

33:15
Pranay Jaiswal:
Well, their rules are different, but I'm not going to say that the data privacy is not a priority in the US. I think it is a priority everywhere. And Celonis has pretty solid capabilities to secure data, transmit your data in a private fashion. So I think the priorities are aligned. We may have different rules within in Europe around GDPR regulations that may not exist in US, but if you talk about priority, I think it's one of the key elements in every implementation cycle. And that has to be one that is one of the biggest thing is, OK, show me your privacy protocols, how secure you are, are you encrypting your stuff, what does the TLA compliance looks like. We and I personally went through a pretty massive checklist in my previous role, so I can tell you that is a fairly one of the biggest thing on my mind whenever we pull in any new vendor. It is going through the checklist of things.

34:22
Jakub:
Yeah, I can imagine this can be quite a headache for security officers that need to check all the compliance in the world. It's hell, but we all can agree that it is necessary as well.

34:39
Pranay Jaiswal:
Growing needs crypto, I don't know how we will take the crypto payments, but yes, I think that's the next wave of payments. When someone says, can I pay with my Bitcoins? Or something like that, then i just say, yeah, we will see in the future.

34:51
Jakub:
Yeah. We do have some people reaching out to us when they hear that we have a process mining podcast and they just suddenly made this connection. Mining meets probably crypto. So guys, are you into bitcoin or something? Yeah, close enough.

35:04
Patrick:
Yeah, also some gold mining and diamond mining people reach out occasionally.

35:08
Jakub:
Anyhow, Pranay, I also promised I would like to get a little checklist here done. Since you are in both roles, you are now in the vendors role and you were also in Dell Industries where you were actually spearheading the process mining initiative. I would like to now you to kind of think back and just put yourself back into the shoes of a manager who is actually deciding whether should you go for process mining or not. And basically give us and the audience some kind of recommendations of what things they should be even asking before they start with the implementation and start even considering process mining, like from the moment they, let's say, think about it or hear about it for the first time until the moment they actually start running things. So what would be the first thing to do when you have an organization that is, let's say, high tech and in your opinion, ripe for a process mining initiative?

36:08
Pranay Jaiswal:
Yeah, I mean, it can be a generic answer and I can see this is applicable for every implementation, honestly. Figure out why you need this. Like what is the value proposition? Why do you care about process mining? Get yourself an executive sponsor and those sponsors could be your CIO, it could be CFOs. I've seen them being the Chiefs supply chain officers and I have seen this picked up over the last few months where we have a lot of supply chain disruptions. So they are getting very engaged and in supply chain and process mining. So getting an executive sponsor is one of the key checklist items that you have to have to make this happen. With that discussion, figure out what your strategic goals are like. Why should we do it? How can we align on a goal? It could be cost ways, it could be revenue based, it could be EBIT based. Any goal that your CEO cares about. And your champion can be CEO, too. Like we have had multiple CEOs discussions where they are very passionate about the subject. And then you bring in your technical guys in. You bring in your technology platform guys, make sure that we can run through our technical checklist of privacy, security. You look at your data and see what are the use case where you can deploy price mining in. What type of data do we need? What type of thing about on premises vs cloud? I think we would definitely want to stay cloud because of the agility it provides. It provides a lot of data science real time capabilities. So make that decision whether you want to go EMS or on prem and obviously you can from there figured out, ok, if I were to do this, should I be doing it myself or leveraging on my SA partners or should I be giving it to Celonis. So these are some of the checklist items I would definitely do.

38:22
Patrick:
What, in your opinion, is the hallmark of a company where you would say, they're almost there, but it's still a little not mature enough for process mining? Is there such a company? Have you come across this yourself? And what would you say is one of the biggest notes that you could say, yeah, as long as you don't have this or maybe you need to kind of transform your business more before process mining really makes sense for you.

38:47
Pranay Jaiswal:
Yeah. Unless you are working, I don't know. And unless you're working paper based companies where you don't have to have a digital trail, I think we can make anything happen as long as you have data, right? So I always think about if you have data, meaning if you have a unique identifier, if you have a timestamp and an activity, these are two things you need to make it happen. So as long as you have non-paper based business, it is applicable.

39:18
Jakub:
What about some lessons learned? So in your previous role, did you also do some mistakes that you can now also openly acknowledge that you would probably do otherwise now that you learned? As we all make those.

39:34
Pranay Jaiswal:
I tend to make a lot of mistakes. Yes, not major ones, though. I mean, yes, I made some mistakes, a ton of them thinking about process mining. or sit on a set of I'm going to say that sometimes you underestimate the power of it. Obviously, you want it to take it slow. Then I would say it's highly recommended to use cloud based EMS platform instead of on premise. It gets you ton of agility. It takes a lot of data engineering activity that you have to go through, If you want to make it on premises. That is one of the challenges we've had. And we have spent a lot of hours, a lot of hours in managing pipelines and building those pipelines and always debugging issues and when you have missing data, you go back and repull the data and you do delta loads or full loads like we have done everything that you can imagine. So you can take all of that away. If you connect directly to EMS, execution management system, which is a cloud based, that's what that's what we call it. But you take away all of the data engineering activities, put them in cloud and then use those resources to drive net new implementations or extract value from your existing implementations. So I would I would highly recommend you do that. Our vendor experience in the cloud, which took a lot of work.

41:15
Patrick:
Looking back at your time with Celonis, what are some of the biggest transformations or the big successes that you've seen or witnessed happening at the company.

41:26
Pranay Jaiswal:
I've seen a lot in the high tech industry, where for example they were adding 20000 sales reps through an acquisition and it was humongous. It was one of the largest in the history and we were able to successfully merge the two salesforce together leveraging process mining, leveraging all the insights that we get from the sales process Now the devil's advocate is which we have done the same thing, like if you didn't had process mining existed, we would have done the same thing. It would have been more painful though but yes, I mean, that's one of the success factors where having that insight into the process, having the insight into the sales process, making the transition easier from moving the entire company from one shift to a different sales tax. So it was fairly successful practice. On the other hand, we have seen a ton of other examples where companies were able to move their SAPs from on prem to cloud. And we have had two successful implementations where we literally move them. We were basically their GPS systems behind their migration. We were literally telling them, guys, this is how you should do it. And they were able to do that. And that's one of the industry pet peeves. They don't want to move because it is painful and we've made it so much easier for them. So I mean, we have so many different examples of success stories that that makes this as a pretty unique product.

43:15
Jakub:
Yeah. Change is always painful. Pranay, looking into the future, what gets you excited about tomorrow's features in Celonis that are maybe coming up in that we might not even know about yet?

43:29
Pranay Jaiswal:
So I'm fairly passionate about our signal link and EMS capabilities. We are adding so many different apps, very industry specific apps, with which you can literally pull your data in and deploy it and start realizing value. So we are moving towards that direction. Also personally I'm very passionate about multi event data models where you can deploy EMS into multiple applications, multiple value streams of your ecosystem and then everything pulls together so that you have this one giant digital twin of your organization. So I'm very passionate about that subject. Obviously it has applicability in supply chain where now you can use that capability to say, ok, where's my shipments at? Where are my procuring my raw materials? What are the delay between all these activities? It's a pretty massive orchestration that you have to do. And Celonis can do it in massive scale, that's the beauty of it. It is still not a startup, but we have matured over the last ten years into an EMS capability. So I think the whole journey of EMS plus we have added a ton of our partner ecosystem, so we have a pretty massive partners that that can help you get ramped up. Even with our ServiceNow partnership that we have just announced that will just make work flow will happen. So I mean, all these things are really exciting that are brewing right now.

45:03
Jakub:
Yeah. It is also exciting for us as a partner and having these feature in our hands and doing things that we can with that. That's pretty exciting. Pranay, thank you very, very much for coming to our podcast, as usual, has been a lovely discussion and hearing these opinions and how things are going also on the other side of the ocean because obviously we are operating and recording from Europe right now. Having you joining us from Austin, it's been a great, great pleasure. Thank you very much.

45:33
Pranay Jaiswal:
Pleasure's all mine. Thank you guys.

45:35
Jakub:
For you, dear listeners, thank you for listening to our podcast. We hope that you're having fun and that you're learning and growing together with us. If you like us, leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to the podcast. If you have any questions, write us an email. We are very active on LinkedIn. We can also receive emails on our email, which is miningyourbusinesspodcast@gmail.com and we will be always very happy to hear anything from you, whether it's recommendation or question or just whether you are interested in what t-shirt Patrick is wearing today. We can give you answers for all of that. Thank you very much for listening and see you, hear you and talk to you on the next episode of the Mining Your Business podcast. Bye bye.

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