Silico has announced a strategic partnership with Marcadus. Marcadus is a Dutch-based management consultancy firm that is a Celonis Gold Partner. The partners will see Marcadus combine the Celonis process mining platform with the Silico Process Simulation Platform, with its deep expertise.
The combination will enable clients to leverage the outputs from the Celonis platform to build digital twins within the Silico platform and validate improvement initiatives to stress-test them.
Silico has identified four benefits customers gain:
- Rapidly extend Process Mining outputs to create a flexible Digital Twin of any business process that can measure the impact of change on key strategic metrics
- Simulate the impact changes to any process metric
- Simulate the impact of changes to the design of any part(s) of a process
- Uncover the best opportunities for process improvement at any point in time as the process and its operating environment evolves.
Enterprise Times asked Myles Mclaren, Head of Partnerships at Silico, the nature of the partnership. He replied, “The Partnership is a reseller and implementation partnership, meaning they will resell the Silico process simulation software, but will also be trained up to implement it with their existing clients.
“The majority of their clients are process mining users which Marcadus implements, and process simulation is the natural next step, with the ability to easily create process simulations from existing process mining data. We will also be passing on any relevant clients to them as a partner.”
Closing a virtuous cycle for business process mining
The partnership will enable customers to discover potential process improvements, map, test, and then iterate them before and during deployment. The success of proposed process changes is measurable before they are deployed. Once deployed, process optimisation is easier, and teams can continuously work on improvements. The partnership will benefit both existing Marcadus customers and new logos.
Jan Vianen, CEO of Marcadus, said, “Simulation technology is a key consideration for our clients, and we’re excited to bring Silico’s capabilities to our existing process mining customers. The ability to discover the future impact of process changes and immediately visualise it is something unparalleled in Process Mining technologies. Our expertise in process mining, combined with Silico’s process simulation technology, ensures our customers stay at the forefront of process improvement.”
John Hill, CEO Silico, commented: “We’re thrilled to announce our collaboration with Marcadus. By combining their Process Mining expertise using Celonis with Silico’s Process Simulation capabilities, we can offer exciting possibilities for customers to uncover better process improvement opportunities and maximise the strategic impact of their processes.
“Together with Process Mining, Process Simulation lets organisations create true Digital Twins of their processes. It’s the natural next step for organisations who are pushing the frontiers of process excellence.”
What happens next?
Partnerships sound great on paper, but the actions that both companies commit undertake help to determine their success. Enterprise Times asked Mclaren what steps Silico would take to ensure success. He said, “Silico’s simulation experts will train Marcadus to resell and implement process simulation through training and our ‘Introduction to BPS Course’.”
Silico offers this course for free. It delivers an overview of the Silico Business Process Simulation platform. The course is part of the Silico Academy and is open to enrollment now. The course also reveals how Digital Twin technology can help organisations.
I asked Mclaren whether there is an existing integration between Celonis and the Silico platform. He said, “There is no formal integration with Celonis, however, we can create a process simulation model of most Celonis processes within 48 hours by replicating the process mining structure that a client has previously generated with Celonis or a similar process mining tool.
“Marcadus is a Gold Celonis partner. This means they can easily use process mining data from a client and create a process simulation model from this.”
If this relationship is successful, will Silico look to partner with and extend the Celonis platform and possibly create something greater than the sum of both? What will success look like? I asked Mclaren how he would measure the partnership’s success in a year.
He replied, “By 2024, we hope to have implemented Silico’s Process Simulation with multiple joint clients alongside Marcadus and have a stream of clients interested in turning their process mining data into simulation models to see best options to solve their bottlenecks.
“Process mining currently reveals the bottlenecks of a process and shows where you need to optimise processes, but process simulation allows you to see what your process changes will actually do to your business, and show which optimisation to pick via structural process changes in the simulation models.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Silico will continue to add partnerships in 2023. At the start of the year, it formed another strategic partnership with Arcwide. The only question is whether these are strategic partnerships or just channel partnerships. One question is how many strategic partnerships the software vendor can have.
A strategic partnership with Celonis or IFS might make more sense and have a wider appeal to consultancies globally. If Silico can deliver further customer success for Arcwide and Marcadus, proving its technology further, perhaps wider agreements will follow. Marcadus is not that large, with 21 employees, according to LinkedIn. Will other, larger firms take note of what it is doing?
Silico enables digital twins of business processes for Arcwide
