Celonis and the BMW Group have announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to continuously optimize BMW’s market-defining processes and increase its efficiency, productivity and sustainability.
The two Munich-based industry leaders have also agreed to cooperate in the development of future process mining innovations.
As part of their existing partnership, BMW Group relies on Celonis’ process mining technology to boost its group-wide digitalization initiative. The duo is now focusing on making Celonis available to all of the group’s employees, enabling them to analyze all company processes relevant to them and to identify and eliminate setbacks causing inefficiencies.
As part of the partnership expansion, BMW Group will use the newly-introduced Celonis Process Intelligence Graph for cross-process optimization and it will work on simplifying the software’s user experience, particularly for non-IT-savvy users.
The BMW Group’s Center of Excellence for Process Mining and Celonis’ development team have also agreed to collaborate more closely and accelerate the joint development of process intelligence innovations. This segment will focus on tasks like connecting suppliers in cross-company processes more efficiently by automating the transfer of data (e.g. via CatenaX) and mapping the entire customer journey.
Alexander Buresch, CIO of the BMW Group, said: “The BMW Group aims to be a pioneer in the quality and efficiency of corporate processes. This goal applies especially during our current transformation, the largest in the history of the BMW Group, towards electromobility, digitalization and circularity.
“Continuous analysis and optimization of our end-to-end processes with Celonis is a decisive factor in increasing productivity, minimizing resource consumption and making supply chains more resilient.”
The duo will also focus on the integration of new AI technologies, such as the processing of information for operational employees in the production area. This has the potential to boost operational transparency and accountability by enabling everyone involved in a process to see all the relevant information in areas such as production or logistics.
The expanded collaboration between the BMW Group and Celonis marks a significant milestone in the development and application of process mining, helping set a standard for the automotive industry and other major organizations worldwide.
“BMW is known as a trailblazer in the use of new technologies: the company has been using process mining since 2016 and is also using our recently introduced Process Intelligence Graph to gain a holistic overview of their entire supply chain – from vehicle development to customer delivery and subsequent service,” said Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis.
“Our platform offers companies like the BMW Group unprecedented process intelligence and thus a central decision-making tool to take the right measures, quickly create added value and become more efficient overall.”
In November last year, the company launched its Process Intelligence Graph along with new platform capabilities at the Celonis annual conference in Munich, Germany.
The focus of the new technology is to capture and unify an organization’s process data and enhance it with machine learning and deep process knowledge gathered from thousands of customer deployments over the past decade.