Celonis has started work within five trusts in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to optimize with process intelligence technology.
Under the surface of any organization, there is a network of interconnected processes circulating across various systems and departments, with this having a critical impact on the company’s efficiency.
As shown by a recent Process Optimization Report from Celonis, 63 percent of enterprise leaders say that sub-optimal processes are costing them time and reducing productivity, even though 83 percent see processes as “their greatest lever for value and the fastest lever for change.”
Some of these realizations are perhaps the reason behind the recent boom of process intelligence (PI), which contributes to organizations by taking data from sources such as ERPs and CRMs, and using process mining technology to turn that data into a moving digital twin of a business’ end-to-end processes. Using AI algorithms and specialized process improvement knowledge, PI then directs teams to the places where value is hiding in their processes.
As a global leader in process mining and process intelligence, Celonis is advancing this new frontier for the world’s biggest businesses to become more productive and agile. Recently, Celonis has embarked on a mission to expand its process intelligence expertise, bringing it to more users with some UK-based developments making for interesting case studies.
The United Kingdom is one of the biggest software markets globally, within which “the company is gaining footprint,” Rupal Karia, recently appointed UK GM of Celonis, tells us. “We’ve got some very successful customers and it’s a large portion of FTSE companies – 25 percent of the Fortune 500 globally,” he adds, with the company planning to add to its 150 employees in the UK.
With an ambition to cement its strengths in every industry without straying from the company’s core, Celonis can be seen investing in healthcare, banking and the public sector in the nation, with an ambition to broaden into central government accounts.
Delving into various cases within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), Celonis has started work within five trusts in the country, with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust (UHCW NHS Trust) being one of the first of these to benefit from the partnership.
In that particular trust lay a fundamental issue – “there was a really high number of people who did not show up for their appointments, or canceled last minute, which is a problem because you can’t reuse that appointment,” Karia says.
Using the process mining and intelligence approach, Celonis worked to delve into how and when updates to appointments are triggered to reach a better adoption rate.
“So just by looking at that particular issue and sending text messages had a huge improvement to the number of people who turned up. We suggested changing text messages from roughly four days and then again one day prior, to 14 and four days prior, which meant any canceled appointments were re-utilized, given the team had more time to fill them. So that was a really simple use case.”
With the NHS being a good example of a complex use case with a large amount of disparate information, Celonis dug into its processes to identify more key bottlenecks. For example, despite common assumptions that the lack of doctors and nurses in a particular trust was creating long delays, the team found that the bottleneck could not be down to medical staffing issues at all.
“It could be that patients weren’t taken up to the theatre soon enough or the room or surgical instruments weren’t sterilized and therefore the room wasn’t available,” Karia reveals.
This realization plays a key role in problem-solving and optimizing NHS resources because “even adding 20 more doctors, if the assigned room is unavailable – and these are some very early indications, but we will prove this quite quickly. [Basically] if we just fixed those figures and secured hospital porters [instead of stretching budgets even further] for more doctors, it will make all the difference,” Karia shares.
The team has identified that proving and fixing this problem has a huge potential for improvement in productivity, which also highlights that sometimes the need for more staff might not be the way to fix the root issue.
He adds: “If you can disseminate all of that, really start to work out these links and you realize which system we get that information from – once you start putting out all these different [elements], you can see where the real bottleneck is.”
While demonstrating the practical application of PI, there is one common misconception that users have – that process intelligence would replace other platforms they are using. “They sometimes ask, ‘Which platform am I replacing and what’s the benefit?’ Actually we don’t see it like that, we see it like this: the benefit of process intelligence as a top layer over your current systems should make those more impactful and therefore enable for better ROI.”
As more users tap into the added visibility that process intelligence provides, they can witness the benefits of PI and how those systems work better, increasing understanding of where bottlenecks are. Drawing insights from these direct NHS examples helps demonstrate the advantages of applying process mining that a growing number of enterprises are utilizing to stay ahead of the competition.
