Skip to main content

Celonis Product Documentation

Process Simulation

Process Simulation allows you to measure the impact of potential changes on your processes and the effect they would have on your operations. You can simulate any part of the process and, thereby, assess the impact of decisions beforehand.

Implementing process changes can be very costly and resource-intensive while organizations cannot know in advance whether all changes to a process will increase their execution capacity. For example, removing a bottleneck in one step of the process might create a bottleneck in another step of the process. Simulation is very powerful in general when it comes to assessing the combined impact of several changes in the process.

Process Simulation works in three steps:

  1. Digital Twin Extraction. A Digital Twin is extracted by the user based on the actual process data. It is used as a baseline model for comparing the scenarios (i.e. to-be processes of step 2). The Digital Twin is a graphical model of the as-is process. It contains a BPMN model extended with various statistical parameters about the process. Those parameters describe the incoming cases (e.g. how new cases arrive), the resources working on the process, the activities (their processing times, automation rates), and the connections between those activities (e.g. branching probabilities). The Digital Twin extraction is done inside the Studio. Once created, the Digital Twin needs to be published in Studio before we can proceed to step 2.

    For more information, see: Digital twin extraction

  2. Scenario Creation. The user creates one (or more) Scenario(s) that will be simulated. Each scenario uses the Digital Twin as a starting point. For example, the user can decide on automating a manual activity in the Digital Twin. The user can then run simulations for the Scenarios and Digital Twin on a given duration to visualize the impact on the KPIs. Simulation Scenarios are created from the Simulation Dashboard in Apps.

    For more information, see: Scenario simulation.

  3. Results Comparison View. This view compares the KPIs of the Scenarios to the Digital Twin. Reports can be generated from the comparison of results.

    For more information, see: Results.