Celonis Acquires Symbio, an Innovative Provider of AI-driven Business Process Management Software

Unique mining-first approach redefines the process improvement lifecycle, boosting process and system transformation outcomes

Celonis’ process intelligence gains institutional knowledge, bolstering its ability to make AI work for enterprises

Celonis, the global leader in process mining, today announced the acquisition of Symbioworld GmbH, an innovative provider of AI-driven Business Process Management (BPM) software. The companies today also launched the enhanced version of the Process Cockpit, merging live process insights with data gathered by Symbio into one unified experience. This enables compliant and intelligent process execution across all users of an organization by integrating core process KPIs and insights with customers’ process models and guidelines. Organizations can now provide managers and employees with a unified end-to-end process experience for deploying process best practices aligned with real-time performance metrics and monitoring.

Redefining the process improvement lifecycle

Instead of designing processes in isolation and then taking steps to streamline and automate them, organizations can now adopt a data-driven, system-agnostic approach to optimizing their processes. They can start with analyzing how their current processes actually run and interact, enabling users to design their ideal process based on real-world data. This allows organizations to make improvements like removing unnecessary steps, simplifying processes, standardizing or automating tasks to become more efficient and effective. In addition, processes can be continuously monitored and compared to the designed process to identify deviations and ensure compliance.

This novel mining-first approach to designing processes ensures process improvement is consistently data-driven at each stage of the process management lifecycle. For system transformations, where process analysis and modeling play a crucial role, this approach enables greater accuracy and precision of process understanding, mitigating unforeseen risks when transitioning systems and facilitating easier change for business users.

Mining and modeling insights in one seamless joint product experience

The newly designed and optimized processes are available to all employees via Symbio’s Navigator, which is fully embedded in Microsoft Teams. To make this experience even more powerful, Celonis and Symbio have collaborated on an enhanced version of the Process Cockpit, enabling both managers and employees to drive fully guided system and process transformation programs, while monitoring the performance and adoption in real time. The Process Cockpit is available in beta and already being used by select customers.

Enabling AI with deeper Process Intelligence

Celonis is the ideal enablement layer for key emerging technologies such as AI. It provides GenAI based assistants with the structured process data foundation and the necessary understanding of the business processes, ensuring their effective enterprise deployment.

Process designs and documentation contain institutional knowledge of why processes run the way they do, for example, the steps, procedures, risks and people involved in onboarding a new vendor according to newly implemented ESG guidelines. Combining the vast amount of process information contained in such models with Celonis' extensive process knowledge gathered over the past decade, gives rise to a new class of process intelligence. This new breed is unmatched in accuracy and comprehensiveness, setting it apart from anything else available on the market.

Alex Rinke, co-CEO and co-founder of Celonis, said: “With Celonis and Symbio joining forces, we have made a huge leap towards providing our customers with an even richer class of process intelligence. Symbio enhances the capabilities of the Celonis platform, bringing world-class process mining and process management together in one home. Customers will now be able to not only mine their processes to identify opportunities and capture value, but also design their processes with a modern, AI-assisted process modeling solution.”

Oliver Zeller, CEO and co-founder of Symbio, added: “Combining our expertise in providing an objective perspective of the entire workflow with Celonis’ market-leading process mining technology provides our large joint customer base with employee-centric process intelligence at scale. Employees and their entire organizations will now be able to gain new insights, such as the root cause for a bottleneck, combined with context that allows them to apply improvement recommendations and drive performance, faster than ever before. This enables every employee to improve their day-to-day operations and is critical for companies undergoing process- and system transformations, as they are now able to redesign their processes based on the world’s best process insights.”

Etienne Kneschke, Executive Director Business Process Management at KARL STORZ SE & Co KG, comments: “We have been working with Symbio and Celonis for a long time and are excited to see these champions in process mining and BPM join forces, enabling our company to optimize our business processes fully system-agnostically. We are now able to redesign our processes based on the world’s best process insights. Process intelligence is the foundational enabler of Generative AI-based automation in enterprises, as it feeds LLM-models with the essential contextual understanding they need, in order to know how the business runs across systems, departments, and regions.”

A study¹ of the process modeling market by Gartner summarizes that “Combined with performance monitoring data to provide execution and real-time optimization, business process modeling increases the chances of a successful digital business transition and change during times of disruption. Therefore, the perspective of the enterprise becomes very important in aligning, adapting, and modifying these processes to create and leverage opportunities that ride these waves of disruptive change. This is especially true for digital optimization and transformation initiatives.”

Learn more about Symbio and our joint solution at Celosphere 2023 (in Munich, Germany on November 14-15) - you can register here.

About Celonis

Since 2011, Celonis has helped thousands of the world’s largest and most esteemed companies yield immediate cash impact, radically improve customer experience, and reduce carbon emissions. Its Process Intelligence platform uses industry-leading process mining technology and AI to present companies with a living digital twin of their end-to-end processes. For the first time, everyone in an organization has a common language for how the business runs, visibility into where value is hiding, and the ability to capture it. Celonis is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA with more than 20 offices worldwide.

© 2023 Celonis SE. All rights reserved. Celonis and the Celonis “droplet” logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Celonis SE in Germany and other jurisdictions. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

About Symbio

Symbio was founded in 2005 by Oliver Zeller (CEO) and Steffen Ploetz (Managing Director), and has its HQ in Aschheim, near Munich. Symbio is an innovation leader in enterprise business process and quality management software, which enables their customers to model, optimize and control their daily business processes. Companies such as the BMW Group, Deutsche Bahn, the European Space Agency, E.ON, Fresenius Kabi, Karl Storz and many more rely on Symbio and establish a platform to digitize and network knowledge for the sustainable optimization of their future.

Symbio has about 40 employees, a large footprint in the DACH market with a global service offering. You can find more information on Symbio here.

Symbio is a high-growth software company, which received a growth investment from Fortino Capital, a European B2B software investor, in December 2022.

¹Gartner Market Guide for Enterprise Business Process Analysis Tools, published 12 June 2023

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