Doculabs and Celonis connect people and technology to drive business value

The Celonis and Doculabs partnership recently entered its second year with ambitious goals. They told us their plan to enable clients to deliver more than just automation and RPA. Together, they’re focusing on client end-value and making a lasting impact beyond simple qualitative measures.

The partnership is another example of how the process mining and execution management giant pulls its partnership levers to deliver meaningful value for clients through collaboration. To help us understand more about this “platinum” partnership, HFS analysts connected with Marty Pavlik of Doculabs and Christoph Kisker of Celonis for this videocast.

Doculabs aims to help companies adapt new technology into existing infrastructure with Celonis as the enabler

Doculabs is a 30-year-old management consulting firm specializing in process optimization. Marty describes Doculabs’ mission as helping clients across a range of industries to adopt digital technologies and redesign their processes. He used a great analogy to explain why enterprises need tools like Celonis:

Behind me is the old Chicago post office, built in 1921. They left the building 20 years ago, and the likes of Uber and Walgreens have since moved in. The problem is that the building was built for a different purpose—they now have to re-engineer the entire building to adapt it. It’s the same as companies as they try to adapt to new technologies.

—Marty Pavlik, Executive Vice President, Doculabs

Re-engineering processes, much like the Chicago post office, is where they hope the Doculabs and Celonis partnership can deliver real value. Beginning in 2020, Marty and Christoph explained that the relationship has gone from strength to strength as Doculabs scooped up the 2021 Celonis Americas Region Partner of the Year accolade.

Doculabs is developing Celonis apps to identify enterprise value

Training its consultants on Celonis for Consulting, Doculabs has been able to apply its intellectual capital and knowledge over the last 30 years to apps. It allows the management consulting firm to transition from talking about value to delivering it to clients.

Marty told us about one of Doculabs’ earliest use cases with Celonis: a large financial institution wanted to develop the business case for transitioning to a new workflow platform. Using Celonis, Doculabs provided the financial impact of the migration and which specific processes to target. Marty describes it as “a tremendous success story.” Marty told us about other apps Doculabs developed with Celonis, including one for fraud management and a soon-to-be-launched application for manufacturing. Christoph explained from Celonis’ perspective how the partnership brings technology and knowledge together to drive value:

We will establish a very strong thought leadership in the industry and bring to our clients knowledge about the processes. The digitization helps to serve clients everywhere across the globe. That’s the power of the partnership and the future of consulting.

—Christoph Kisker, Vice President of Digital Consulting, Celonis

But technology isn’t the only thing at the forefront of this partnership; people play a pivotal role

This partnership is about more than just the technology; the two companies place people at the core of how they work together. Ultimately, Doculabs and Celonis clients come to them for technology and business expertise combined. Integrating the Celonis team into the mix means that Doculabs can demonstrate wider knowledge and capabilities.

What this partnership brought to us was a team. When we go to a client with Celonis, we’re one team, and the expansion of that team has been a tremendous competitive advantage for us.

—Marty Pavlik, Executive Vice President, Doculabs

Marty told us about one of Doculabs’ insurance clients that wanted to analyze its subrogation. It had also approached others, including the Big 4. To win the bid, Doculabs leveraged Celonis for Consulting to dramatically reduce the time frames and boost the amount of value it could deliver for the client. In fact, Doculabs could digest this insurance firm’s data and show the complete end-to-end process, including more than 4,500 process path variations, in just 10 days. In doing so, Doculabs delivered results in just eight weeks. Without access to Celonis for Consulting, Marty predicts competitors could have taken almost a year to achieve the same.

The Bottom Line: Technology alone cannot guarantee success for process mining initiatives. It’s all about bringing people and technology together to identify business value

Early indicators prove the partnership has potential—it’s already driving value for clients, and Doculabs continues to train its consultants on Celonis for Consulting. Any enterprise considering process mining should keep a close eye on this partnership. The people plus technology approach adopted by Celonis and Doculabs, combined with their joint expertise, could help organizations leverage this exciting technology category to its full potential, and move beyond the traditional automation opportunity identification towards genuine process transformation.