Protiviti Teams with Celonis to Deliver Controls Excellence Process Mining App

App utilises next-gen technology to help organisations apply a risk and controls lens to execution and drive business improvement

MENLO PARK, CA, February 25, 2021 – Global consulting firm Protiviti has launched its Controls Excellence App built on the Celonis Execution Management System platform. Created in response to the rapidly changing business environment, the app utilises advanced analytics, machine learning and data visualisation to help business leaders identify control failures in real-time, pinpoint the root cause of the failure and make data-driven decisions to maximise not just process effectiveness but also efficiency.

“There’s a wealth of knowledge to be gleaned through process mining, but we found that – prior to our creation of this app with Celonis – there wasn’t a simple way for teams responsible for risk management and internal controls to identify and close the execution gaps in their work. However, these teams at many of our clients were using process mining for exploratory analysis and process discovery and hadn’t been able to unlock its potential with respect to analysis of controls performance,” said Andrew Struthers-Kennedy, a Protiviti managing director and leader of the Technology Audit practice. “Our Controls Excellence app serves as a risk and controls lens providing an enterprise view into whether key controls are in place and operating effectively while arming teams with the tools necessary to quickly categorise and investigate failures when they arise. Control owners are automatically notified whenever a transaction does not follow a desired path, enabling immediate corrective action to be taken.”

Designed to apply to a broad range of industries and use cases, the app uses the power of process mining, combined with machine learning capabilities through the Celonis Execution Management System, to analyse not only the activities performed, but the sequence in which they are performed, plus throughput times and a view of process conformance, to create analyses that traditional data analytics tools cannot perform. The app also provides a platform to continuously monitor controls as well as key efficiency metrics. The app can be leveraged throughout all levels of an organisation.

• At the executive level, providing heads of finance, operations, IT and internal audit with a dashboard to analyse and visualise process and controls performance
• Process owners who need to identify the root cause of a failed control and monitor process-level performance
• Operators and technicians who need to be alerted in real-time when certain activities are not completed, to allow for corrective action

By enhancing core process mining capabilities with this view into controls performance, process owners and other stakeholders can take a data-driven approach to help them find the right balance between efficiency and control, ensuring processes operate within risk tolerances while also achieving desired business outcomes and KPIs.

“Protiviti is among the most experienced consultancies in the process mining space, so it was an easy decision for us to deepen our existing partnership and work with them to build out one of the first partner-developed applications in our new Execution Management System,” said Malhar Kamdar, Chief Ecosystem Officer at Celonis. “We are excited to see the full potential of Execution Management technology come to life through the Protiviti Controls Excellence app and to collaborate with Protiviti as we help our clients close their execution gaps and achieve their full execution capacity.”

The application was built in the new Celonis Studio, which allows for the creation of Execution Instruments and Execution Applications on the EMS platform to tackle unique business challenges. Access to the app can be requested from Protiviti directly or through the Celonis EMS Store. To learn more about process mining and assurance, watch the video available here.

About Celonis

Celonis believes that every company can unlock its full execution capacity. Powered by its market-leading process mining core, the Celonis Execution Management System provides a set of instruments, applications, and developer studio and platform capabilities for business executives and users. The Celonis EMS offerings help companies manage every facet of execution management from analytics to strategy and planning, management, actions and automation. Celonis has thousands of customers, including some of the largest global companies across a variety of industries. Celonis is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA and has 15 offices worldwide.