Celonis has announced the appointment of Rupal Karia as VP & Country Leader for UK&I. Karia joins the company after holding a similar role at UiPath. He has had over twenty years in the industry leading both short-term business transformation and long-term organizational success.
Prior to UiPath he spent two and a half years at Adobe as Head of Strategic Accounts & Head of UK Public Sector. He also spent seventeen years at Fujitsu in two stints, where he also became VP and Head of UK&I. He left for a year to join LogicaCMG as a transition program manager. In his new role at Celonis, he will be responsible for driving growth across the organisation. He is a graduate of Kingston University with a 1st class degree in business Information technology.
Philippe Mathieu, SVP for EMEA and APAC at Celonis, comments, “I am thrilled that Rupal has joined Celonis to lead our rapidly growing UK&I team. Rupal has played a critical role expanding hyper-growth businesses throughout both the UK and Ireland. His track record of growth, unwavering focus on delivering customer value, and inclusive leadership approach will help even more organizations in the region see how their processes actually run, not how they think they run, creating visibility into where value is hiding as well as the ability to capture it.”
Karia commented, “I am thrilled to join Celonis and look forward to leveraging my prior experience to deliver value and impact for Celonis customers. I am especially excited about the Process Intelligence (PI) Graph, which brings data and knowledge to help companies realize more value at greater speed. It provides the process intelligence that companies need to successfully deploy technologies like automation and AI. I look forward to working with customers to optimize their processes, accelerate growth, develop sustainable businesses and jump-start their AI journey with Celonis.”
Powering up UK&I
Celonis has had significant success within UK&I for its process mining platform. Customers include BP, NHS, Ocado Group, Reckitt and Vodafone. Reckitt alone has optimised over 40 processes across five business functions savings tens of millions of dollars. It started small, using Celonis to help automate its Accounts Payable processes. Kuldeep Dudeja, IT & Digital Director at Reckitt commented, “We initially just wanted to have better control and visibility in Finance. It has great execution power in driving our digital transformation.” It expanded its use across the organisation, creating a centre of excellence for Celonis.
Across its customer base in the UK&I Celonis has improved processes with positive impact to cash flow, customer satisfaction and reduced carbon emissions. Karia will now lead UK&I working closely with customers and partners to identify, prioritize and capture value opportunities hidden within their processes.
One recent partnership, that might flourish with Karia in charge is that with Fujitsu. Celonis only recently announced the expansion of the partnership with the global technology company. It will be interesting to see how that relationship evolves in the UK.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Karia has deep experience of leading organisations to success in UK&I. He is also passionate about diversity in the workplace. He was recognised as number 18 in the Financial Times Empower Minority Executives list (North America and UK in 2018). And in the FTs top 100 list for most influential Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic leaders in technology in 2018 for his contribution to the area.
Both awards were over five years ago now, can he make an impact on Celonis and be ranked again? This is a solid hire by Celonis of an experienced leader. It will be interesting to see how he develops UK&I moving forward. His relationships within Fujitsu may expand the relationship with the Japanese company.
Karia also joins at an exciting time for Celonis. At its conference last November it announced Process Intelligence (PI) Graph. An object-centric process mining tool that is able to capture the complex relationships within organisational process flows. Market leading, it could help drive sales in the region.
