Latest news with #CelonisProcessIntelligence
Techday NZ
7 days ago
- Business
- Techday NZ
Smart billing app delivers up to USD $4 million in savings
Celonis and the Good Quarter Company have co-developed a smart billing application designed to help utility companies improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction in their meter-to-cash processes. The application, named the Celonis Utilities Smart Billing app, aims to optimise the sequence of steps from meter readings through to cash collection, a workflow central to the effective delivery of utility services. Utility companies have long faced challenges in the meter-to-cash cycle, including issues such as inaccurate meter readings or malfunctioning meters, data entry errors, inconsistencies in bill generation caused by fragmented systems, and ineffective payment collection. These problems can result in revenue loss, unstable cash flow, and dissatisfaction among customers. Israel Expósito, Industry Principal, Telecommunications & Utilities at Celonis, said: "The Utilities Smart Billing app empowers utilities to transform their billing operations and enables them to move from reactive issue management to proactive, data-led performance improvement." The app brings a process intelligence layer to utilities' existing infrastructure, integrating with enterprise solutions such as SAP ECC and S/4HANA Utilities. This integration allows companies to retain their current systems while benefitting from new data-driven insights and operational enhancements. Ashwin Santhanam, Founder of The Good Quarter Company, commented: "By bringing Celonis Process Intelligence to the meter-to-cash cycle, we were able to build a solution that provides real-time process visibility and business context necessary for long-term business transformation and process excellence." The main objectives of the app include reducing the risk of errors by improving invoice accuracy, reading precision, and detecting previously unbilled revenue. It addresses issues such as late or forgotten meter reads, incomplete invoices or payments, and reliance on estimates instead of actual data. The result is improved risk mitigation and revenue capture. To optimise working capital, the app is designed to accelerate cash flow by issuing invoices in a timely manner and increasing the proportion of on-time payments. It does this by concentrating on the problems of delayed invoices and overdue payments. Operational costs are tackled by increasing the rate of successful, accurate meter readings on the first attempt and decreasing the need for manual interventions. The software achieves this through improved routing and prioritisation of meter-read tasks, more effective handling of exceptions, and minimisation of rework and cancellations. Among the app's features is the Billing Timeliness Tracker, which helps ensure invoices are sent promptly by monitoring and seeking to optimise billing cycle times. The Meter Read Performance Analyser evaluates meter reading accuracy and timeliness to identify problematic areas or meters. An Invoice Volume Forecaster utilises historic usage trends to project future invoice volumes, aiding utilities in resource planning. The Executive Dashboard provides management with a high-level overview of meter-to-cash metrics for rapid issue identification and decision-making. The Leading Indicator Alert System detects early warning signs of potential problems within the meter-to-cash workflow, such as a rise in read failures or delays in billing, allowing companies to intervene before issues escalate. The Performance Benchmarking Tool compares current results with targets and industry standards, helping companies spot areas needing improvement. Utility organisations using the app have reported immediate benefits. A North American utility with several billion USD in revenue experienced significant meter-to-cash challenges following a period of rapid growth. Upon deploying the app, the company gained real-time process visibility and was able to implement targeted improvements. The application identified costly unresolved exceptions that were responsible for invoice delays and offered insights to streamline exception handling, leading to a substantial reduction in manual meter rereads and associated truck rolls. The deployment delivered measurable gains, including identification of USD $1.5 million in savings related to truck rolls within four to six weeks, and between USD $3 million and USD $4 million in savings across the entire meter-to-cash process. Additional advantages included a reduction in manual work, a more rapid meter-to-cash cycle due to proactive monitoring, and support for a more data-driven approach to business operations. The Celonis Utilities Smart Billing app is part of the Celonis Platform Apps Program, which provides companies with solutions developed by ecosystem partners on the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform.
Techday NZ
14-05-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Celonis expands AI & orchestration in latest platform upgrades
Celonis has introduced a series of updates to its Process Intelligence platform, highlighting new features that enhance the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in business operations and process mining. The company showcased major enhancements designed to make its platform faster, more user-friendly, and more compatible with commonly used enterprise tools. These developments focus on providing businesses with the intelligence required to effectively deploy AI alongside human workers. Alex Rinke, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Celonis, stated, "For AI to provide maximum value for business, it needs to do things like telling you which customer deliveries are at risk and take automated action to reroute deliveries and notify logistics partners. "Celonis Process Intelligence makes this possible. It provides AI with the process knowledge and business context to make it effective in accomplishing business-critical tasks, like mitigating supply chain disruptions, optimising inventory, and managing tariffs. That's why we strongly believe that for enterprise use cases, 'there's no AI without PI'." Central to the update is the Process Intelligence Graph (PI Graph), which combines process data and business information to form a digital representation of business operations. This PI Graph underpins the company's AgentC suite, a collection of AI agent tools and integrations that enable AI systems to access process intelligence whether customers choose to develop their own agents on platforms such as Microsoft Copilot Studio, Amazon Bedrock, or Salesforce Agentforce, or use prebuilt agents provided by Celonis and its partners. The AgentC suite received significant upgrades, including an expanded Process Intelligence API. This extension was developed to simplify and secure the sharing of process intelligence context, metrics, and recommended actions with a range of AI platforms. These updates aim to ensure that AI agents can be more readily integrated into established enterprise environments. Modern businesses employ a variety of technologies such as system automations, workflow automations, robotic process automation (RPA) bots, and manual tasks. However, they often face challenges overseeing and managing all these tools across different departments and systems. To address this, Celonis has introduced the Orchestration Engine, an orchestration platform that coordinates tasks across these varied tools and provides businesses with increased control and agility. The engine leverages real-time process intelligence to monitor workflows and direct them toward desired outcomes. Additional advancements were announced to support the use of AI within the Celonis ecosystem. Process Copilots, now generally available, allow employees to interact with business processes directly within collaboration applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams. This facilitates faster access to process information and identification of issues requiring attention. The Celonis Annotation Builder, a no-code generative AI tool for recommending decisions, is now generally available as well. This tool provides users with AI-driven suggestions for resolving process issues and opportunities for process improvement in real-time analytics dashboards. Other improvements to the platform include an expanded catalogue of pre-built objects and events for the PI Graph, designed to enable existing customers to integrate their data models more quickly. New version control features have also been added to aid management of the PI Graph for individual customers. The integration of Celonis Process Management through a new API brings together process mining and process modelling, allowing for detailed and accurate assessment of process adherence by importing process models directly into the platform's Process Adherence Manager. Microsoft users can now benefit from Celonis' zero-copy integration with Microsoft Fabric, which enables the embedding of process intelligence directly into the solutions being created within Microsoft's ecosystem. The latest event log builder enables users to generate, adjust and examine event logs interactively within Celonis Views, removing the need for external data modelling or technical coding. Updates to the Studio Views component introduce scalable view modules to ensure changes are propagated wherever utilised, enhanced data visualisations and filtering for deeper analytic work, and the ability to distribute scheduled process insights to decision-makers at set intervals. The new PQL Editor, designed for the process query language used within the Celonis platform, is now synchronised with customer knowledge models and business context, improving usability for business analysts. Dan Brown, Chief Product Officer at Celonis, commented, "Alongside our partners, we continuously invest in our platform. With AgentC and our Process Intelligence API, we're helping customers to maximise the ROI of their AI deployments. Orchestration Engine enables stronger oversight and control of process workflows. And Solution Suites shorten time to value by making it faster and easier to deploy PI and AI across the enterprise."
