Celonis Celosphere 2025 | Timo Peters, Bayer

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Timo Peters

Head of Process Insights & Value

Bayer

play_circle_outline Timo discusses his long journey with Celonis, starting from 2011.

play_circle_outline Emphasis on the importance of a close partnership with Celonis for company growth.

play_circle_outline Challenges addressed include data management and cultural change within the organization.

play_circle_outline Process mining centers of excellence enhance collaboration and business transformation efforts.

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Timo Peters, Bayer

Timo Peters

Head of Process Insights & Value Bayer

In this Celosphere 2025 segment, Bayer’s Timo Peters joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson to share how Bayer scaled Celonis from 300 to 4,000+ users in just months and why close partnership matters when you’re evolving at high velocity. Peters reflects on Bayer’s long journey (Bayer was Celonis customer #3) and explains why Process Intelligence and change management must go hand-in-hand: data readiness, trust-building, training and culture all determine adoption. He also unpacks how Bayer uses PI to pinpoint root causes before change, then measu... Read more

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What is the speaker's experience and journey with Celonis and its growth over time? add

What is the significance of maintaining a close relationship and being proactive in a partnership with Celonis? add

What challenges are organizations facing in improving transparency and efficiency through process mining and data-driven approaches? add

What is the significance of process mining centers of excellence in business transformation and how does AI technology enhance this process? add

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Timo Peters, Bayer

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon CUBE community, and welcome back to Munich, Germany. We're here coming to the close of day two of our live coverage at Celosphere. My name is Savannah Peterson, bringing you all the fun stories from the floor with Rob Strechay. Rob, I think this might be the most customer stories we've ever had at a show.

Rob Strechay

>> I believe you are correct. Definitely at any show I've ever done. This has been fantastic, and I think it helps other customers understand that the journey is possible and that process intelligence can help you get there.

Savannah Peterson

>> And it's really refreshing to have it shown and not just told.

Rob Strechay

>> Agreed.

Savannah Peterson

>> Speaking of a great customer guests, Timo, welcome to the show.

Timo Peters

>> Thanks for inviting, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's great to have you. Tell us a little bit about your journey with Celonis, how long you've been working with them, why you even reached out in the first place?

Timo Peters

>> Yeah, I mean actually, so we are customer number three from Celonis.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh my goodness, I didn't realize that. That's cool.

Timo Peters

>> We started around about 2011, 2012, but at that time I was not working for Bayer, so I started my journey around about 2019. At that time I was with Nokia and I transitioned 2020 to Bayer. So, long experience, always use them and know a lot of people from Celonis. And we had always a quite powerful journey. So, we scaled from 300 to over 4,000 users in a couple of months. We are now looking to all the intelligence part, what's coming up. So, great journey, and it was always amazing to see how the company's growing and being a part as a customer of a journey, so yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I can imagine that feedback loop has been pretty incredible. I mean, being customer three, you're basically day one customer. Obviously, you're joining in that process just a little bit later down the line, but so many different features that have rolled out, so many different tools. How important has it been for you to have a partner like Celonis as you've continued to evolve, and especially at the velocity that we're all operating at right now?

Timo Peters

>> I think in general it's very important. So, if you really want to go with all the steps that you have a quite close relationship, not only in the sense that you always have the latest projects, that you're also looking for what is next and also helping to shape it and bring it into the right space. Otherwise, it's like maybe it's not fitting for your company, so you might be facing a lot of challenges. And being proactive and being a partner of Celonis and they being partner of us was always very important and we always was looking for, and we're still doing.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, getting to that scale where there's 4,000 users is pretty massive. What are some of the challenges that you've been looking to address using this to improve transparency and efficiency?

Timo Peters

>> For sure, we're trying inside of Bayer to really going to this real process mining thing, so that you say, first I need to understand from data or from data driven or from science-driven point of view where the problems are that you're really addressing the root cause of this one. And then you want to really start your change journey. I think if you're looking over all the other suppliers, or not other suppliers, other customers what we have, and we have a quite good community, so we're always seeing that main topics to be successful is on one side, head side is the data, it's still always a topic. And then the next big topic is the change management. So, it's not only a technical change or a technical improvement or the next new tool, it's also many times you need to organize and build the new culture into the company that you're able to addressing this amount of people and carry them with you and driving value of it. And this is-

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that you just brought that up, because I think that's really important. I think sometimes us in the nerd world get very excited about tech and tooling, but it doesn't matter if nobody uses it, or doesn't use it to its full potential. How do you as a team keep up that culture of both collaboration and innovation and trust within the tooling of something like Celonis?

Timo Peters

>> So trust, I mean, on one hand side you need to build a solution what is really working, so you need to create a value add. And sometimes it's in sense value of money, so very important for companies, but from user point of view it's like you also want to improve the way of how they're handling things. So, the user journey. And if you're able to show actually you do better things, as strong it gets about, so very important key. And then it's always us and Celonis who's pushing it, because normally it start as well with training. So, you need to start to train the people, so you need to build the trust. So, it's a complete journey of the people actually. And this we only can do both together. And we have a little bit like the saying, "Technology sparks the change, but mindset and culture is doing the change."

Rob Strechay

>> Right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, I love that.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think that ties in really well with what I was thinking. We had heard that you have a really significant process mining centers of excellence. How do you look at that playing a role as you continue that culture, as you continue to bring that to the forefront?

Timo Peters

>> Actually, I strongly believe, and also if you're now seeing in the latest steps what's happening with Celonis that they now want to come more a platform, it's able to lift us to a totally different level in sense of how we're approaching the change. So, it's not anymore a change of process, it's like a transition of a business transformation. So, you're really going to that point to say, "Now we really can look to end to end and we can get the power with all the support from AI technology, from orchestration point of view to really make it and understanding complex things more easy." And this is big time helping us. So, it's also a change inside, again a change inside of the company that we now have these capabilities there, and we as well how people are working together inside of a company is going to change. So, you're not sitting anymore in your own process, so you're more connected with others, and that is big time change, but very positive.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it. That's positive. And it sounds like since you've been able to evolve and continue to leverage all of the benefits of Celonis over the years, it's pretty great. How have the processes that you're able to optimize matured or changed or evolved over those years? Are they getting more complex? Are you identifying new things? Is it more AI driven? Talk to me about that.

Timo Peters

>> It's an interesting, really interesting question. So, how your process is going to evolve, and traditionally you would say in a continuous improvement cycle you should come to a point where your process is working idle and everything is perfect. But actually, with all the changes and impacts what's going to happen, so the world is getting more complex. And this is where we more and more see the need of it. So, for sure we're going to permanently improving the processes, we get them more efficient, we get them more performant. Yes, we're starting to apply AI in all the kind of process where either users get it supported, they get augmented to do their stuff, or where things automatically get resolved. I think this is a great thing, but yes, you also need to control them. So, you need to look to your agents, are they still doing the right stuff? And you can as well use the process mining for this.

Rob Strechay

>> How do you look at it? I mean, we heard you're being recognized as one of Celonis Champions this year. How do you look at that recognition and what you've done so far and where you want to go with Celonis?

Timo Peters

>> I mean, first of all it's an honor. So, to be in that Champions Team, and six years ago that was still a small group, so I know the most of them, and a long time, they're more like just random contacts. We really grow a friendship between the most. And this was amazing story, and also Lars Reinkemeyer, I don't know if you know him, but he was building the whole thing up, and that was an amazing story, so big honor. And interesting is that it's so open community, so we're exchanging so much, there's so much to learn. We're facing the same challenges in that, and it also helping us to form our visions where we want to go, because you see different kind of angle. Every other company has a different focus, so what is totally okay? And then if you're having this exchange, you're going to learn out of that, you see a different angle and you can improve this thing. So, for sure where we want to go big time in AI.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was curious about that actually. I'm glad you brought that up. I was wondering if y'all got together and got to kind of swap war stories about what it's like, figuring out what to optimize or little wins that you're having. I mean, obviously there's a culture of competition in any capitalistic economy. However, we've been talking about a lot on the show, the culture of collaboration in general right now feels different, because no one could move at this philosophy alone.

Timo Peters

>> Yeah, I mean, you can't move alone. I mean, first of all it makes no sense to always compete on all the stuff. I mean, yes, for sure there are other companies we might be in competition with, but it's not meaning we can share our challenges. The big challenges again was discuss data or the cultural change, and here you see the common part, or if you're talking about certain kind of very important things for the industry, so if you're looking into the life science or pharma industry, there are certain kind of relation what we all need to have and take in place. And we have a common interest that they really get also as a product implemented inside of Celonis, and we can help each other in that other sense, yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Where do you think the most impact or what measurable impact have you seen out of process intelligence and scaling it across Bayer?

Timo Peters

>> I think it's a couple of them, right? So, and it's always, you might be deciding, "So, is it really impact on the P&L?" I mean, that is always the idea you love to have, so-

Savannah Peterson

>> Everyone can relate to that.

Timo Peters

>> Yeah, everyone, yeah. So, oh that is what you want to have. But it's also important that you look above this, because you want to transition to the new way of company or culture or technology. Because if you don't do that and you can't do a proper nice transition to this one, you get left behind. And that is very important to stay on top. And I think especially we had a lot of discussions regarding AI, and what is the combination of PI and AI, so how it's going together. And I still believe you need to understand where you can apply AI correctly. If you don't know where to apply it, you might be do it on the wrong thing, and it's not so then you believe or it's not giving you the impact you need. And this combination is very, very powerful.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, just to follow up on that for a second, I think that I agree with you. And I think I've been saying it's a wave, and especially with agents and understanding what's going to ... What processes, what pieces of processes can or can't be replaced by an agent or enhanced by an agent. Are you seeing that as part of the way that you're going forward with your AI strategy is using the process intelligence to kind of help you understand this is where we're going to, we can shorten this, take off toil from people and have them be more efficient. And again, not replacing them, but enhancing what they do from that perspective?

Timo Peters

>> Yeah, we're early in that phase, but yes, correctly, that's the point. The first one is you want to enhance and augment the people that they have a easier life, and getting all the information they need to make might be a decision. You want to have them on the hand, so you don't want to search. If you're starting to search, it's taking a long time to do that. And the AI capability on one hand side can provide us all the information we need. Every of us might be using ChatGPT or something like this one. And you see how we're starting to collect information different, how we're using this kind of AI power to prepare everything that we can start quicker to learn about it, quicker understand, can make a quicker decision. And the second part is also can help us in the background to do a lot of stuff. So, classifying things so that it's already clear what we can do automating things. And important, I think it will also help us to reshape things. So, what we're not sort of it could be do so that we see processes different, that we see operations different, that we see how we can run a company different.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's a whole different set of glasses you get to slip on essentially. Follow-up question there, just because you've had, in the words of Celonis you are quite the epicenter of process excellence, I'll give you their compliment. What would be your advice to companies that are trying to figure out where to start or what to optimize first? How do you make that digestible?

Timo Peters

>> You always have the discussion and also with Celonis we're trying to help as well companies that's starting in their journey. I think they are very important starting point is, I see many times they're selecting just one use case and starting to lose the journey. But sometimes it's like you do the wrong selection. So, because you're starting too small in the sense of finding your idea, "What I want to do?" And always a good approach is like, go a bit broader. So, looking a little bit for a couple of use cases. And then you need to quantify them what is the right one you really want to go? Because if you're sitting on the wrong horse, so you're going to end up and say, "Now I don't find value what is very important for starting." And you choose the one, the wrong one, and then you need to restart and it's taking you again time to do this. So, especially at the beginning it's very important to understand what is the right case. I believe cases where money is going to flow in as the company and going out are normally very good cases, starting to be good. And there's a good track that you can get money out of this one. And then if you're going as a next step, if you have your first success, it's very important that you're not running from use case to use case, that you're starting strategically to expanding your process area, your data area, so that you're building up the future. And that is like what you always end step-by-step extending.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely, I think that's great advice. Final question for you. When we're hanging out at Celosphere 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Timo Peters

>> So, dreams our reality, so might be from dreaming point would be having more than 10,000 users. So, we have heavily implemented AI, right? We are doing orchestration. We might be on the main stage. Yeah, that would be either-

Savannah Peterson

>> There we go. Let's make it happen.

Rob Strechay

>> Well, you have competition with some of the other customers, so-

Savannah Peterson

>> For sure, yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> That's for sure.

Timo Peters

>> Everyone want to do right. You asked for the dream.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes, absolutely, love it.

Savannah Peterson

>> We are dreamers here, and we love hearing it. Timo, thank you so much for being here with us today, and thank you, Rob, for a wonderful day so far.

Rob Strechay

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank all of you for tuning into our continuous live coverage here from Celosphere in Munich, Germany. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.