Optimising workflows with ServiceNow and Celonis
October 2021 saw ServiceNow and Celonis announce a new strategic partnership with the aim to help companies maximise the impact and return on their digital transformation investments.
The pair share the common goal of optimising workflows for their shared customers.
Combining ServiceNow’s leading low-code workflow platform with the real-time process execution capabilities of the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) means customers can now identify and prioritise processes that are suitable for automation.
Not even a year after this announcement, AI Magazine spoke to Rob Popovic, Global Head, ServiceNow Alliance and Sales at Celonis and Seb Fitzjohn, Vice President, Alliances and Channel Ecosystem, EMEA at ServiceNow to learn more about how the partnership has developed.
Popovic leads the ServiceNow partnership at Celonis and outlined to us: “The three pillars of the partnership are centred around going to market together to solve problems for our joint customers. The other two that support the partnership are embodying the promise of the solutions by using one another's technology. Both Celonis and ServiceNow are committed to using each other's technologies to solve problems within our respective businesses.”
Adding to this, Fitzjohn commented: “The partnership is new, but the synergies between Celonis and ServiceNow are massive. It's all about accelerating client value. It's all about addressing the challenging problems that organisations have. The relationship between Celonis and ServiceNow is a relationship of reciprocity. We complement each other. And if you bring that together with our joint clients, it's about the acceleration of their business outcomes and their transformation journey.”
Identifying inefficiencies with Celonis and solving them with ServiceNow
The pair work together to optimise workflows for their shared customers. Celonis is tasked with finding inefficiencies in business processes and ServiceNow uses its Now platform to fix those inefficiencies - often through automation.
“Celonis are able to go into the thousands of business processes that any organisation will typically be running and provide the x-ray on how those processes are operating today. So they can go in and look at where the critical path is, where the bottlenecks are, where the efficiencies are, where the opportunity to kind of make improvements are. They almost provide the x-ray on an organisation's business process,” said Fitzjohn.
“What ServiceNow is then able to do with Celonis and with our joint customers is to provide the prescription so we can see where the areas to optimise the business process might be fantastic. We ask: What are we now going to do? How do we actually use that X-ray to actually deliver and drive some actual transformation?” he added.
The Now platform is perfectly placed to help drive transformation with automation. Fitzjohn highlights that the platform it is about boosting business agility, business resilience and customer service.
“This notion of automation 100% drives productivity, it drives cost, it drives efficiency, but it also drives some incremental value in terms of the type of experience that you can deliver to your employees and to your customers,” he noted.
Following the announcement, Forrester analysed the partnership and said it will close the loop from insights to automation and Popovic explains why this is the case: “I think Forrester is spot on. If you think about the applications and the breadth and depth of ServiceNow's portfolio, automation is part of that fabric. You take the insights that Celonis surface the Now platform that ServiceNow deliver, and with that deliver and enrich the user experience. So when we think about the fix and the context of automation it's about modernising remediating, and then ultimately enriching the experience.”
“We're all only just getting started in terms of the opportunity,” concluded Fitzjohn.
