As a technology company and decacorn that grew from 50 to 3,000 employees in just ten years, Celonis faced a pivotal challenge: how could it leverage people data more effectively to support a rapidly scaling business and empower its leaders to make smarter, data-informed decisions? The answer lay in a journey toward analytical maturity, powered by Workday.
For Celonis, the challenge was to consciously move up the People Analytics Maturity Model. “I see this as a four-stage journey,” says Jerome Geyer-Klingeberg, senior director, people & culture program office at Celonis. “A journey from basic to advanced reporting, then to true analytics, and ultimately to data intelligence. Our goal was to move from simply asking what happened to understanding why it happened, and we already have a pilot running on predicting what might happen next.”
When the goal is to build a culture where data insights are used as a tool for daily decision-making, the challenge becomes how best to provide the needed intelligence. "Changing our people's mindset to use data, metrics, and insights in their natural flow of work is a massive exercise," explains Geyer-Klingeberg.
Our mission is to translate our workforce data into a deeper understanding of our people, and enable our stakeholders to drive data-informed decisions.
Senior Director, People & Culture Program Office
A unified platform for a multi-level journey.
Celonis began its journey by using Workday core analytics and reporting, creating hubs to establish a solid data foundation of standardized and consolidated HR reporting. To advance further, the team embraced Workday discovery boards and Workday People Analytics, building a roadmap of deeper insights and use cases from headcount and attrition to performance and compensation in compliance with the various data protection regulations in the countries in which Celonis operates.
Insights gathered via Workday Peakon Employee Voice added an additional dimension, surfacing a more holistic view of the company with real-time employee sentiment data.
“The beauty of the workforce reporting and analytics solutions that we are using is that they’re all built into Workday,” Geyer-Klingeberg explains. “That it sits in one system is very important and a prerequisite to drive adoption.”
What usually took us hours, sometimes days ... now, we have it almost in real time, and you can slice the data in the way we need to find the insights that matter.
Senior Director, People & Culture Program Office
From data crunching to strategic partnership.
The impact so far has been significant. Celonis has moved from static, manual Excel reports to dynamic, interactive dashboards that the executive leadership and key stakeholders in the People & Culture teams can self-serve and explore on their own.
The success of this new capability became apparent when one of the company’sHR leaders, in a meeting with a senior executive, was able to open an HR discovery board and answer people insights questions about organizational efficiency on the spot—transforming the conversation to focus on strategic insights, not data retrieval.
“This is why the role in our team is named ‘People Analytics Consultants,’” Geyer-Klingeberg notes. “At our current stage of maturity, success isn’t just about building the perfect dashboard; it’s about partnering with the HR expert teams and business leaders to interpret the data and drive decisions.”
Members of the People Analytics team at Celonis now operate as both consultants and product managers; building Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), testing those with users, and seeking instant feedback to constantly iterate and improve, ultimately adding value to the business.
This evolution allows Celonis to better execute on its people strategy, monitor its effectiveness, and use the data insights to adapt the strategy when needed.
A strong emphasis on the importance of cross-functional collaboration.
Achieving company-wide results required more than just technology; it demanded a strong foundation of governance and teamwork. Geyer-Klingeberg notes that company leaders knew investing in the internal alignment of metrics was important. However, to achieve robust governance across data sources, metrics calculation, and security permissions, they also realized that cross-functional teamwork between IT, finance, legal and privacy, and various People & Culture teams was absolutely critical to success.
Workday offers a unified platform that connects various data sources to understand how different things correlate and influence each other. This allows us to collaborate with a common language, making it a key asset for Celonis.
Senior Director, People & Culture Program Office
For others on a similar journey, Geyer-Klingeberg’s advice is clear: “Don’t start with what tool to implement; ask what business questions you want to address. Impactful people analytics is not a project, it is a complete transformation of how you use data insights to drive your people strategy and business forward.”