The executive problem
At Celonis, I worked in the ecosystem / Partner Acceleration team as a Senior Solution Manager. One recurring problem kept surfacing with senior Finance and Supply Chain personas: a CFO or CSCO cannot realistically drill through dozens of dashboards and tabs to understand what's happening across a function. They need a high-level answer to a small set of questions —
- What is happening?
- How are we performing?
- Where are we deviating from expectations?
- What is the impact?
- Where should we act?
What we built
I led work around two diagnostic concepts:
Supply Chain Diagnostic — covering procurement, inventory, order management and related operational KPIs.
Finance Diagnostic — covering Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, working capital and related financial KPIs.
Both were built to let senior executives see what's happening in the function, how performance compares against internal or external benchmarks, where performance falls below expectations, what's driving the deviation, the potential impact or loss, and the potential value that could be realised by acting.
How it created value
The diagnostics were used with multiple partners and helped build the value case for deeper transformation engagements. The pattern held consistently: Executive problem → Diagnostic → Benchmark → Deviation → Quantified impact → Value case → Deeper engagement.
The technology is not the story. The business problem and the value opportunity are the story.
What I learned
The biggest lesson was that Process Intelligence becomes significantly more powerful once it's translated into an executive decision-making language. Building the diagnostic was a technical exercise; making it change how a CFO or CSCO thinks about their function was the actual point.