Exclusive: How Celonis is reshaping digital transformation journeys

Digital transformation is often a long and complex journey. But for Kerry Brown, Transformation Evangelist at Celonis, it's also a question of confidence, clarity and asking the right questions up front.

"When you're looking at trying to be quick and sustainable, you want to spend your money wisely," Brown said.

"If I know what my business is doing, and I have a digital twin that shows me how my business runs, I can make wise choices that will allow me to move swiftly with confidence."

Brown, who has been with Celonis for over three years, brings more than 25 years of experience in strategy, consulting, and enterprise change to her role.

She works closely with business leaders to help them modernise operations, cut costs and ultimately make better, faster decisions.

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Brown's route into the tech sector wasn't traditional.

"I did sports marketing as my degree and thought I'd grow up and run the Olympics," she said. After a marketing role at Australian company CSR, she found herself part of a transformation project involving SAP in the lead-up to Y2K.

"I did all the change management and continued on doing change and transformation in oil and gas, then Coca-Cola Enterprises globally. From there, I joined SAP."

Brown likens digital transformation to "moving house", and system transformation to the physical act of moving the house itself. "Whether you're doing a lift and shift, a move to a kit house, or designing your own custom home, it's about changing the structure of your processes," she explained.

Celonis, which specialises in process mining and execution management, helps customers understand and improve how their organisations run. At the core is the idea of the 'living digital twin'—a real-time, end-to-end data model of how a company actually operates.

"To me, a digital twin is a corporate version of looking at your bank statement and saying, 'What did I really spend on food last month?'" she said. "It's a factual representation of all the transactions that take place in an organisation."

That factual clarity matters, Brown said, because it often reveals gaps between perception and reality. "You think you know what you do, but a digital twin shows you the truth of your operations, not just best memory," she added. "It lets you make informed choices."

Among the biggest challenges organisations face, Brown believes, is understanding and sticking to scope.

"It's really easy to go over budget when you discover something else along the way. In the current economic climate, deciding on scope is super hard because it's such a volatile market."

Celonis' platform aims to help leaders make better investment decisions by providing real-time visibility into what their systems are doing and what they're worth. "Most custom code that gets built in systems doesn't get used—upwards of 80%," she said. "With Celonis, you can see which code is actually tied to revenue or customer value. That helps you know what to retire and what to keep."

She offered several examples of customers achieving tangible benefits.

"Harman International used Celonis to identify that 35% of their custom code wasn't adding value," she said.

"Florida Crystals used us to decide between a Greenfield or Brownfield approach to ERP migration and finished their project in 12 months."

"Another customer, a large medical organisation, estimated it would save 13,000 hours of work using Celonis," Brown added.

So what distinguishes Celonis from other transformation tools? According to Brown, it's the platform's ability to bridge the gap between business and IT. "There are plenty of modelling tools, but Celonis combines data, real-time insights and process intelligence across systems like Salesforce, Oracle and SAP," she said.

"We're system-agnostic. That means we give you breadth of view, real-time accuracy and factual decision-making."

She added that Celonis is sometimes used in tandem with reporting tools like Power BI.

"Power BI is great for dashboards, but customers use it to link to Celonis for the drill-downs. It's the difference between a lagging indicator and a real-time truth."

When asked why process mining is essential for companies looking to transform quickly and sustainably, Brown was direct: "Because surprises are expensive. A digital twin gives you the facts so you can move with confidence and build something you know you need."

Her advice to CIOs and CFOs starting their transformation journey?

"This will be one of the most significant investments of your organisation and your career. So get as many facts as you can so you can make great choices," she said. "There's nothing worse than being midway through and getting surprises."

Brown finished off the interview with a word of caution for those still unsure: "Surprises are not friendly in transformation. Facts over feelings will help you stay on scope, on time, on budget and on value."