Celonis Celosphere 2025 | Erik Severinghaus, Schaeffler & Michael Eichinger, SCHAEFFLER

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More from Celonis Celosphere 2025

Erik Severinghaus

Co-Founder & Co-CEO

Bloomfilter

ME

Michael Eichinger

Head of PMT Software

Schaeffler

play_circle_outline Introduction of guests Erik and Michael at Celosphere in Munich, Germany.

play_circle_outline Erik Severinghaus Unveils Bloomfilter's Partnership with Celonis on Software Development Lifecycle and New Agent Miner for Process Intelligence

play_circle_outline Michael Eichinger from Schaeffler explains his role in optimizing software development processes.

play_circle_outline Transforming Automotive R&D: Anticipating Celosphere's Showcase of Efficiency Gains and Software Development Improvements

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Erik Severinghaus, Schaeffler & Michael Eichinger, SCHAEFFLER

Erik Severinghaus

Co-Founder & Co-CEO Bloomfilter

ME

Michael Eichinger

Head of PMT Software Schaeffler

In this Celosphere 2025 interview, Bloomfilter co-founder and co-CEO Erik Severinghaus and Michael Eichinger, head of PMT Software at Schaeffler AG, join theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson to discuss how process intelligence is shaping real software development outcomes. Severinghaus details “Celonis for the Software Development Lifecycle” and the newly announced Celonis Agent Miner, powered by Bloomfilter, which maps human and agent actions into one process intelligence graph to reduce waste. Eichinger explains why Schaeffler turned to process mini... Read more

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What are the names and roles of the guests being introduced at the Celosphere event in Munich? add

What is the recent announcement made by Bloomfilter regarding their partnership with Celonis and its applications? add

What is your name, your role at Schaeffler, and what does Schaeffler do? add

What will be discussed regarding improvements in the automotive industry development and the role of AI and process intelligence in that transformation? add

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Erik Severinghaus, Schaeffler & Michael Eichinger, SCHAEFFLER

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, nerd fam, and welcome back to beautiful Bavaria. We're here on day two of Celosphere in Munich, Germany. My name's Savannah Peterson. Very excited to be bringing to you two brand new guests, Erik and Michael. Thank you both so much for taking the time.

>> Thanks for being here.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Thank you so much for having us.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is a joy. Celonis always brings us the best and brightest of their customers. Since you are new to our news desk, I would love if you could just take a quick second, tell us a little bit about your respective companies and what you do there. Erik, I'm going to start with you since you're in the hot seat next to me.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Awesome. Well, thank you so much. My name is Erik Severinghaus. I'm the co-founder and co-CEO of a Celonis partner called Bloomfilter. So, about a year ago we announced with Celonis, Celonis for the Software Development Lifecycle. And this is the ability to process mine how we're building software, understand where is there waste, where's there rework, where are there long-cycle times? And then, just most recently, yesterday, hot off the presses, we announced Celonis Agent Miner, powered by Bloomfilter. So, it's the ability to combine the agents and the humans into one process intelligence graph and use that process intelligence to optimize human behavior or agentic behavior.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's really exciting.

Erik Severinghaus

>> It is unbelievably cool stuff.

Savannah Peterson

>> Congratulations.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Was that even fathomable a year and a half ago?

Erik Severinghaus

>> It wasn't fathomable nine months ago. This world is evolving so quickly, we have to run at a full sprint to keep up.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes. I feel like we're all in a constant sprint. Thankfully, we're all in good shape on this news desk right now, so we can keep up. Michael, why don't you give us a little bit of background.

>> First of all, my name is Michael, Michael Eichinger, and I work for Schaeffler. Schaeffler is known for bearings normally, but it's also a strong automotive supplier. And we develop, on the one side, everything what is needed for Ics, combustion engines, and also electrical vehicles. And at Schaeffler, I'm in charge of the PMT. Means, I'm head of PMT software. PMT stands for process, methods and tools for the software developers. And this is one of the main reasons why we was in contact now with Bloomfilter, Celonis, because the process, you have to have a look into it to improve it, you have to understand it. And like an x-ray, we need here with Celonis guys.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. So, I love that all your partnership is basically moving at the same velocity as our technological hype cycle right now. Y'all have been working together for about three months, if I'm not mistaken. So, give me a little bit of background. Michael, I'm going to start with you on this one, since you were just talking about it. When you were evaluating how to optimize your software development process, what was it that attracted you to Bloomfilter and Celonis in the first place?

>> It's a very good and fair question. So, before we come to Bloomfilter, we started to understand our process. And normally, we have also some theoretical methods, like value stream mapping. And here, really, you paint the process on the ball a long line with different swim lanes where actors are and you try always to understand. Hard work. It's their opinion of unique persons visible in one project or it depends also on the training, but it's not really the facts and the figures behind the real working style across the world. So, we have participated on a special training internal company. It was called Process Automation Analysts. And one of our product owners, I don't mention her name, Sena Tilikan, I'm not so serious as I should be. Sorry for that.

Savannah Peterson

>> We love that. We want authentic. We love the laughs. They look better on camera, anyway. We're all real people here. We're not AI.

>> She showed us, hey, she's working on the topic of process mining. She sell it very well. And here, we've had immediately the tooling for the theory. And the tooling was with Celonis and Bloomfilter. So, we was now able to think and to improve our way of working and have really looked into what we are doing. And this was the start for the negotiations and the discussions. And really, we are in the middle of a process right now. So, this is just the wish to get facts and figures and a deep look into, let me say, our softer body.

Savannah Peterson

>> Which makes a lot of sense considering the vision of your company. Talk to me a little bit about how... I want to go back just one step because Bloomfilter does something awesome that I feel like everyone is talking about right now, right? When we think about AI and just the velocity of the technological curve right now, software development, one of the spaces that we're seeing the biggest leaps and bounds.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Exactly.

Savannah Peterson

>> How long ago were you anticipating that this was going to be the case?

Erik Severinghaus

>> Well, I would love to say that I've been planning this for 20 years. The reality is we founded Bloomfilter about three years ago. And when you think about how the world has changed, three years ago we thought of software development as carbon-based meat sacks banging paws on keyboards in order to make code happen. It feels like the stone ages. It is the most primitive thing imaginable. And we thought of a process, as humans needing to interact. Three years ago at Celosphere, we didn't even define it that way. That's just what process meant. It was how human beings collaborate, maybe there was an automation tool in there somewhere. Well, think about how the world has changed now. When I talk about humans banging paws on keyboards to make work happen, my God, that feels weird, right? It's like rubbing sticks together to make a fire.

Savannah Peterson

>> Especially to the young generation, who have now just been vibe coding their entire lives.

Erik Severinghaus

>> But even us. And so, what our customers, what came across loud and clear was you cannot model the software development process anymore if you can't model how the agents and the humans are interacting. The problem is nobody in the world has ever modeled how humans and agents are interacting at scale together. So, there's agentic observability platforms, they don't have a clue what the humans are doing. There's human platforms, none of them are monitoring the agents.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we're doing two silos like we did in the old days or mini silos versus your holistic approach-

Erik Severinghaus

>> So, shock, 95% of those things are not returning value in the... We all read the MIT study, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, everyone's favorite study.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Pilot's don't go into production. Exactly. And so, we said, "Well, we've got this process intelligence graph. We're modeling the process. We better pull that information in and we better combine it, so we can get a unified view of what's happening."

Savannah Peterson

>> This must feel pretty cool then to be here at this Celosphere, three years later, and everyone wants to talk about what you're doing?

Erik Severinghaus

>> I mean, it is unbelievably cool for Alex Rinke to be talking about us on stage, for Dan Brown to be talking about us in the keynote is the future of product around how we're thinking about agents and humans interacting?

Savannah Peterson

>> They both talked about you on our stage too this week.

Erik Severinghaus

>> I did not know that. That is the news to me.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, your ears should have been buzzing the whole time.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Yeah, I'm going to have to go back and find clips of that. That's awesome.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. No, they both did mention... So, talk to me about the vision for your collaboration. Now, that you're starting to sink in a little bit here, what are you hoping to be able to collaborate on together with the support of Celonis? Michael, I'll start with you.

>> He teased it already, so the AI is also a very strong background for us. So, I have to answer in two directions. I have two passes where I have to work on, where as is today and also the near future. In the as is today, I would like really to understand how we are working, where we are and what is really happening in the world to improve and to increase the efficiency, just to have a magic words. But the near future also in our embedded software, hey, if we talk from software and embedded software, there's slightly a difference. The similarity is software, but the way of working is really drastically different. And in two to three years, maybe we have also some ideas, hey, we bring in some agents who are improvement topics, whatever will come, we don't know it. But therefore, we have to understand where we are. And if we know where we are, we can go in the direction to improve the right elements and increase the right efficiencies. My open and honest opinion, let's see when there's the support of Celonis possible and Bloomfilter. So, first, was always Celonis and Bloomfilter. Bloomfilter are the software guys. They understand us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and they're solving problems that you're trying to solve internally every day. We've had a lot of different people from Celonis and they're the platform. You're the ability to provide the vertical specificity, that would be impossible if you were trying to do it across every single industry.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Well, it's a little different than that. So, it's more of the use case than the industry. So, the use case around how we build software, although I should note the agentic stuff is actually cross .

Savannah Peterson

>> Everything. Yeah, yeah.

Erik Severinghaus

>> So, that doesn't need the SDLC. But when you think about the use case of how we build software, we work across industries. So, we have auto, we have financial services, we have software companies, we have burrito companies, you name it. We're-

Savannah Peterson

>> Amazing. Now I'm hungry. Thanks a lot.

Erik Severinghaus

>> We have a great case study with Chipotle we can tell you all about. But what's really interesting is there's a certain segment of industries that have regulatory necessity and they have competitive pressure. And when those two forces collide of like, "We know we need to move faster to compete, but we can't cut corners or we go to jail."

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, literally.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Well, the only way out of that box is to improve process because you can't strip the process down. You still have to execute the process, but you need to do it in a way that allows you to move faster in order to keep up with the competitors. And so, we are across industry, we focus on the software development lifecycle use case, but we do find that the industries where there's a regulatory and the competitive pressure together really creates a tinder box of pressure that's creating a lot of demand for us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and probably a bit of corporate attention in that case.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's hard to know where to focus right now. Everyone wants to do a lot of different things all at once. And so, I think that it's a well-articulated sweet spot that you have.

Erik Severinghaus

>> We want a use case that the boardroom cares about is what I would say. And the cool thing is at many companies, what we're talking about is a board-level problem, both about how do we efficiently build software in order to ship product? And then, also in terms of we know that we need to integrate AI into our capabilities, but how do we do that in a way that doesn't create risk?

Savannah Peterson

>> That doesn't create risk and also creates value.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Exactly.

Savannah Peterson

>> So, when someone like Michael comes to you, what's that day one like? What are the first steps you take with the company?

Erik Severinghaus

>> Yeah, the most important thing is understanding the constraint environment. So, we want to understand what are the business problems they want to solve? Is it around shipping faster? Is it around productivity? Is it around cost? Is it around risk? So, there's a few value levers that are always really important. And it's Celonis, everything is numbers, everything is business value case. So, that's critical to start there. But then we need to understand the constraint environment. What are the processes we need to follow? What are the regulatory requirements? What are the software models look like that we need to pull data out of? And then, how do we incorporate that together? And so, really making all of those things work together, it's like a multi-sided Rubik's Cube. And so we need to get all of those things in alignment to then go show value.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and that's probably a tool for companies internally because there's that natural tension and you can really help them focus on what's going to be faster versus longer-term vision. It feels like there's a new era of collaboration right now, both in software and technology, because no one's just going to be the one AI company, or the one software stack, or the one solution for engineering something. How is the experience that you're having right now, Michael, different from say, historical experiences when you would try and approach similar software challenges?

>> We have to challenge such something comparable at the moment, but just to complete picture from, Erik, it's important for me, one of the first steps, what we have learned is we have to align on the wording, on the naming, that we understand us. So, we was talking from software, but we was not on the same side. We was on the same coin. And then, we have really to understand each other. And then, we was able to jump into the details, into the data and to express what means what. And that was one of the essential learnings for me that this Celonis-Bloomfield, the way of thinking is totally different from ours at the automotive industry. And honestly, we have not faced with issues before because we did always in theory, but right now we are more open-minded and with the help of these colleagues, we really had a look into our data, which was the data was always there, but now we see it slightly different. And this is something what is new and very important. So, it's not something in the past, it's now opening a gate for the future where we can really improve.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. That refreshed lens allows you to have the context and situational awareness in a way that we couldn't have before. Okay, gentlemen, I have one final question for you because this has been a fantastic first cameo on theCUBE. When we're hanging out at Celosphere next year, 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today? Michael, I'm going to start with you giving me great eye contact.

>> We will not say something, we will showcase you how really the improvement within the automotive industry development, in the R&D was really looking like in the past and how we improved it and how the efficiency was increased by the support of the colleagues from Bloomfield and Celonis.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we can't wait to see-

>> And we will be on stage for that.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Exactly.

Savannah Peterson

>> Love that. What about you, Erik?

Erik Severinghaus

>> We all know that talk is cheap and action's what matters. And we are showing not only the ability with Schaeffler, we will show the ability to transform the process in terms of how they're executing and accelerate that. And then, the incorporation of the process intelligence into the models so that we will be able to demonstrate, "Here's how much more efficient AI is numerically, provably, how much more efficient AI is when it's enabled by process intelligence." We understand it, we see the leading indicators, we see the green shoots, but all of this is evolving in real time. And by next year, we'll have the proof to be able to demonstrate it mathematically and that's going to be really cool.

Savannah Peterson

>> I can't wait to see that. All right. I have one bonus question for you. What is your lapel? Is that a little buddy?

Erik Severinghaus

>> Yeah. So, this is AI, the agent, right? But if you zoom in, there is no AI without PI.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow.

Erik Severinghaus

>> And so, it is the PI underneath, the process intelligence, that enables the artificial intelligence.

Savannah Peterson

>> Beautiful. You're really on-brand for Celonis. You really went all the way with it, Erik. This has been fantastic, gentlemen. Michael, Erik, thank you so much for being here.

Erik Severinghaus

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you very much.

Savannah Peterson

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