BPM: From ‘set & forget’ to ‘sense & respond’ with process intelligence

There’s a perfect storm disrupting companies’ ability to successfully bring their strategies to life. First there’s a persistent misalignment of people, processes and technology. Too often, technology dominates businesses’ strategic and operational focus at the expense of people and processes.

In the rush to avoid getting left behind, technology is introduced in pockets that don’t work in sync with the rest of the business, creating mountains of technical debt and unrealized ROI on tech investments. Little thought is given to the impact of technology on people and processes, and the complications they can introduce.

Then, there’s the complexity and volatility in the business climate. All businesses have been subject to massive marketplace turbulence resulting from external forces like technology disruption, new compliance initiatives, the climate crisis and geopolitical tensions. It’s harder and harder to anticipate, absorb and adapt to these disruptions while maintaining business continuity and delivering value. Yet these disruptions are relentless in forcing business to adapt or die.

Lastly, the pace of change in the business environment has accelerated exponentially in recent years, since the advent of big data, cloud computing and, of course, the rocket-sled that is artificial intelligence (AI). Change now happens in minutes or seconds, not months or years – and businesses have to keep up. The days of ‘set it and forget it’ (when business models, applications, processes and technology required little adjustment once established) are over. Today, as a result of the pace of change, all of these can become outdated and ineffective too quickly.

The longer business leaders take to respond, the less resilient their businesses will become. To navigate this perfect storm, enterprises need to adopt an active and modern approach to business process management (BPM) that allows them to truly ‘sense and respond.’ Sense change as it happens and respond effectively, while delivering value. The goal of this adaptive approach is to drive better alignment across people, process and technology, and ultimately help businesses more successfully realize their strategy.

The essential components of sense and respond

Sense and respond requires upleveling three essential organizational competencies: organizational self-awareness, absorb and execute and managing change at scale.

Organizational self-awareness

For many organizations there’s a gap between how they think they work and how they actually work. A disconnect between their ideal, modeled processes and their day-to-day reality – fueled by subjective, siloed assessments of as-is workflows. This means it’s impossible to know how external changes will impact processes, let alone respond effectively and efficiently.

Enhancing organizational self-awareness means building an objective, consolidated foundation of process and systems data to plug these gaps. This will ensure the organization holistically understands its potential and limitations. With visibility and detailed understanding of actual end-to-end processes, business can:

• Uncover untapped value opportunities and hidden bottlenecks.
• Identify cross-business task, process and workflow interdependencies.
• Rationalize process improvement investments and refine strategy based on insights.

Absorb and execute

With self-awareness as your baseline, the next step is about absorbing changes in commercial conditions and executing robust real-time responses. Think of it like strapping a fitness tracker to every process – constantly monitoring performance. In this case so you can operationalize and orchestrate new dynamic outcomes that sustain you through disruptions.

It’s also about creating ‘goal-aware’ processes that are informed by – and measure actual performance against – the ideal modeled approach. Ensuring systems provide this level of insight provides an early warning system of any emerging gaps or process anomalies. This enables a coordinated approach to addressing any issues before significant problems accumulate, and being able to optimize the operating model. Over time, this approach enables ongoing improvements to process designs as business needs evolve, minimizing the gap between the ‘should-be’ and ‘as-is.’

Managing change at scale

Managing the change can be the toughest step on the road to a sense and respond operational posture. Successfully implementing large-scale transformation requires strong leadership and clear process knowledge. Teams need centralized, accessible process knowledge linked to real-time performance to break down business silos and adapt effectively to changes.

This integrated approach not only helps to build the right culture but enables clarity and communication for delivering change at scale. It also creates an environment where organizations can drive change forward with the proper business context and governance. Imagine a change management culture where crippling anxiety related to change is converted into empowered agency in your people, making them into change agents.

How process intelligence makes sense and respond possible

When it comes to successful adoption of this adaptive sense and respond approach to process management, elevating enterprise data is the differentiator – in terms of visibility, understanding and orchestration. This is why Celonis Process Intelligence is such a powerful engine for enabling the necessary process transformations in times of rapid change. Let’s take a look.

In terms of organizational self-awareness, Celonis Process Intelligence consolidates all system and process data from across the tech stack (including third-party solutions) into a single intuitive, interrogable platform – a process digital twin. It uses object-centric process mining to provide the hyper-accurate end-to-end workflow understanding and real-time monitoring of as-is processes that make genuine organizational self-awareness and value discovery possible.

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More than that, the digital twin also incorporates all key process management and enterprise architecture data (including ideal modeled processes, business goals and context, compliance, documentation and process governance). This is the perfect basis for the absorb and execute step. It provides a rich experience of operational applications and real-time comparison of how processes should work and how they are working, between expected outcomes and actual outcomes. In this way, process deviations can be detected early and optimizations seamlessly orchestrated across teams, automations and AI agents.

As AI use cases multiply in process management – with optimization evolving from automation toward greater levels of AI autonomy – process intelligence provides the essential input to generate the most value from the technology. The Celonis Process Intelligence Graph captures the relationships between all documents, materials and people that make up your business processes and the context that’s unique to your organization. It’s a completely unique data source to feed AI. All of which means the power of AI can be harnessed to execute process transformations more efficiently, but also with confidence and without hallucination, because process intelligence knows how your business runs and how to make it run better.

Which brings us to managing change at scale. By supporting leaders through enabling teams and technologies with centralized, accessible process knowledge tied to enterprise strategy, Celonis Process Intelligence helps realign vertical departmental silos with a shared and horizontal process-oriented mindset. Cross-team impact on strategic goals is not only understood, but objectively measured, building the environment and providing the tools necessary for driving successful change.

Bringing these core capabilities together into one platform, with all the necessary data and different disciplines, Celonis Process Intelligence creates the engine to rapidly drive enterprise resilience and adaptability at speed, delivering value all the way.

John Santic, director of product marketing at Celonis, contributed to this article.