In this News Desk interview, Tom Smith speaks with ERGO Group Chief Digital Officer Mark Klein at Celonis’ Celosphere 2022 conference in Munich. The two will discuss digital transformation projects and the role of culture, Celonis use cases, co-creation initiatives, and the board game the company created to foster wider acceptance of Celonis technology.
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01:20 — Klein gives an overview of his company and his role. ERGO Group offers life insurance, health insurance, property insurance and property and casualty insurance. We operate not only in Europe, but also in the growing markets of Asia such as China, India and Thailand. It has $19 billion in premium volume. ERGO is Munich Reinsurance Company. Klein said he is responsible for the insurance business that ERGO does with its partners. ERGO adds insurance to ERGO products to make a better proposition for customers.
02:34 — As Chief Digital Officer, Klein is driving the digitization of ERGO and implementing new technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and phone bots. He will lead his Proof of Value initiative with his Celonis technology in 2021, stating: So we found that there were elements that could still be digitized, elements that had to be left out, and where the process needed to be changed. This helps drive digitization and promote customer focus throughout the process. Celonis helps create transparency about where to implement robotics, artificial intelligence, or phone bots.
03:57 — The company has identified two processes so far. This work helped him understand how the Celonis software fits into his ERGO architecture. In today’s challenging times, customer demands are changing. They want faster responses and faster reactions. As such, insurance customers are demanding digitization. The project, called ‘Digital at Scale’, has the goal of driving a more digital and customer-oriented process. ERGO has identified 28 processes that will implement Celonis in the next 18 months. We aim to acquire up to 60-70 processes to transform your business to be more customer-centric, lean, simple and cost-effective.
06:20 — Referring to the co-creation partnership between ERGO and Celonis announced at Celosphere, Klein said the two companies are in close contact and jointly developing projects. The two companies then looked at how ERGO’s knowledge (insurance industry processes and data) could be combined with Celonis’ tools. This creates an innovation partnership where ERGO will have the opportunity to leverage innovations from Celonis and implement them early. “It’s a very good combination and a very practical collaboration.”
07:54 — Klein says he believes digital transformation is primarily cultural transformation. Companies typically have multiple initiatives and projects to drive and rely heavily on the know-how of each individual within the organization. ERGO has recognized the importance of being transparent, understanding what technology does, and demystifying technology so people don’t fear it. To achieve that with process mining, the company developed a real board game in which top managers competed on the task of getting from their location to the airport in the most efficient manner. They could hike, bike, taxi or drive themselves.
09:12 — The game calculated each person’s carbon footprint, money spent, and time spent. Using Celonis, ERGO revealed who was the fastest and who had the highest carbon footprint by real name. This helped employees understand what process mining is. Employees began to think that having the same transparency in the billing process would be a huge benefit. This initiative started at the top and spread across the organization to “show the impact of process mining in a very easy and fun way.”
10:13 — Of the new products Celonis announced at Celosphere, Klein listed three products and their benefits.
- Business Miner: “We love how easy it is for business users to use themselves, so they don’t need to have technical expertise. I have.”
- Process Sphere: “Large organizations need to understand that they live in silos, but we don’t want to. We’re overcoming silos.”
- Update on task mining: “I really hope to see a lot of efficiency gains, especially in areas like finance, where larger processes are already fairly automated…but single tasks — these are my It’s something we can see and really improve.”
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