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Process Mining with Celonis and Salesforce
Author
Manuel Müller
Integration Specialist
Updated on
August 18, 2026
Reading time
5 Min.
At a Glance
- Process mining with Celonis gives organisations a precise view of their business processes.
- This gives companies a clearer understanding of how their organisation operates and where process bottlenecks exist.
- Celonis enriches process mining results with AI, business context and additional data, enabling concrete recommendations for action.
- Combining Celonis and Salesforce helps identify bottlenecks, connect CRM data with other business data and optimise end-to-end processes.
- Process mining increases efficiency and strengthens the customer experience.
Introduction
Rising cost and efficiency pressures, alongside skills shortages, challenge organisations to optimise their business processes and maintain profitability. Salesforce has established itself as the world’s leading CRM platform by connecting sales, marketing and customer service. But how can organisations ensure that all processes work together effectively and that they make the best possible use of the data they gain – even beyond the boundaries of the CRM system?
This is where Process Mining comes in, with Celonis as one of the leading providers. The solution examines business processes in detail and provides clear insights into how they actually run.
What Is Process Mining?
Process Mining gives organisations a precise view of their business processes. Rather than relying on assumptions, the technology shows how planned processes actually run. It analyses the digital traces that each process step leaves in the relevant IT systems – known as event log data or event logs. This creates a digital representation of actual operations that often reveals deviations from the originally planned processes.
Process mining platforms can continuously analyse processes and uncover even the smallest deviations, such as above-average processing times or unusual loops. This gives organisations a clearer understanding of how they operate, where process bottlenecks occur and why delays arise.
Approaches such as Object-Centric Process Mining go one step further. Rather than analysing individual processes in isolation, connected business objects such as customers, opportunities, orders, invoices or service cases can be analysed together. This creates a more comprehensive view of complex end-to-end processes.
Do not always run as planned: Real business processes often differ from the workflows defined in advance.
In practice, this can look as follows: Sales uses Process Mining to uncover inefficient steps in the quotation or contract phase and understand why opportunities repeatedly stall at specific decision points. Customer Service identifies where delays are slowing down customer support and which steps can be simplified to process enquiries more quickly. In Marketing, Process Mining can reveal where prospects drop off and which process paths and touchpoints are most frequently associated with conversion.
A prerequisite for meaningful process mining is sufficiently complete event data that can be traced over time. Organisations should therefore first assess which process steps are documented in Salesforce and connected systems, whether unique object or case IDs are available, and how reliably timestamps and status changes are maintained.
What Does Celonis Do?
Celonis provides its Process Intelligence Platform, which connects process mining with process data, business context and AI. At its core is the Celonis Context Model, which brings together data and knowledge from different systems to create a dynamic digital representation of business operations. Celonis is one of the leading providers of process mining and process intelligence and was recognised as a Leader by Gartner and Everest Group, among others, in 2026.
In addition to powerful, data-driven process mining analyses, the platform offers further capabilities:
Celonis goes beyond analysis by combining process mining insights with AI, structured and unstructured data and business context. The Celonis Context Model plays a key role in this. It maps data, business objects and their relationships across systems, creating a dynamic digital representation of business processes.
Based on this, organisations can identify why processes do not function as intended, uncover optimisation potential and derive concrete measures. Celonis refers to this extended approach as Process Intelligence.
Celonis combines Process Intelligence with AI, forecasting and simulation capabilities to identify potential process risks at an early stage and assess the impact of changes. This enables organisations to act proactively rather than simply responding to issues that have already arisen. Process simulations and what-if scenarios also allow organisations to evaluate the potential impact of changes before implementing them.
Celonis offers numerous pre-built connectors as well as APIs, streaming and zero-copy integrations. This enables the platform to connect with CRM and ERP systems, data warehouses and other existing applications.
Celonis also provides its own extractor for Salesforce. This enables you to combine Salesforce data with information from other systems and analyse end-to-end business processes.
Celonis presents complex processes and KPIs in a clear visual format, making them easier to evaluate. However, the platform goes beyond dashboards alone: insights from process analysis can be used to trigger actions in operational systems and optimise workflows in a targeted way.
Celonis also supports the orchestration of processes across different systems, automations, team members and AI agents.
Advantages of Integrating Salesforce and Celonis
Salesforce is a powerful CRM platform that enables organisations to analyse and optimise a wide range of CRM processes. However, gaining a complete view of actual end-to-end processes becomes more challenging when they extend beyond Salesforce to include ERP, commerce, logistics or other specialist systems. When organisations consider only individual systems or functional areas, interdependencies, bottlenecks and inefficiencies often remain hidden.
The integration of Salesforce and process mining with Celonis helps uncover these bottlenecks, connect data across systems and make better use of the existing data foundation.
Celonis integrates with Salesforce via standardised interfaces. This enables process data from Salesforce to be analysed alongside information from other systems involved. Decision-makers and process managers gain a comprehensive view of end-to-end processes and can identify the causes of delays and deviations more effectively.
The insights gained enable specific optimisation measures to be identified and subsequently implemented in Salesforce through workflows and automations, for example.
Especially in times of economic uncertainty, reducing costs and using resources efficiently is essential. Celonis identifies weaknesses and automation potential in processes such as lead qualification, ticket processing and campaign management.
Through targeted improvements, organisations can save time, reduce costs and increase productivity. Team members can focus more on tasks that require their expertise and personal interaction, while suitable standardised process steps are automated.
Optimised workflows can increase customer satisfaction. They enable faster response times, targeted communication and a consistent customer journey. Process Mining helps identify process issues that directly affect the customer experience, such as long processing times, unnecessary handovers or breaks between systems.
Integrating Salesforce and Celonis enables organisations not only to improve their processes in the short term, but also to analyse them continuously. As new products, markets, teams or systems are added, changes in actual workflows become visible, allowing processes to be adjusted where needed.
This enables organisations to establish standards and identify early on where new process variations or inefficiencies arise.
Salesforce and Celonis in Practice
Abstract process strategies are a thing of the past. With Celonis Process Mining software, organisations can understand their processes and align them with their specific requirements in a practical way. The following scenarios show how sales, customer service and marketing can benefit from integrating Salesforce and Celonis.
The interaction follows a simple logic: Celonis analyses process data and identifies deviations and optimisation potential. This provides the basis for appropriate measures, which can then be integrated into operational processes through Salesforce workflows, automations or AI capabilities.
A company’s sales team spends a significant amount of time on manual data entry. They also lack visibility into which leads to prioritise. Delayed lead processing results in low conversion rates, while opportunities repeatedly stall at specific stages of the sales process. This creates gaps between the planned sales process and its actual execution.
Celonis analyses the lead-to-cash process and identifies bottlenecks and process gaps. In addition to Salesforce data, it can incorporate information from other systems involved. This makes it clear, for example, where opportunities remain idle for particularly long periods, approvals delay processes, or individual steps are repeated unnecessarily often. Based on these insights, companies can refine their sales process and automate selected workflows in Salesforce. For example, tasks or reminders can be triggered for sales team members to ensure leads and opportunities are followed up on in good time.
The Result: Faster sales processes and more targeted management of leads and opportunities through effective prioritisation and shorter response times.
Customers lose patience when enquiries are not handled promptly. However, recurring enquiries tie up service team resources. At the same time, specific enquiries do not always reach the right team directly. Customers also sometimes experience inconsistent interactions across different channels.
Celonis analyses the service process and identifies frequent escalations, long waiting times and delays in case routing. Process managers can then build on these insights and optimise or automate selected steps in Salesforce, ensuring that enquiries, for example, are directed straight to the responsible team members.
The Result: Shorter processing times, fewer unnecessary handovers and more efficient customer service.
Potential customers drop off because campaigns and touchpoints are not aligned. Targeting is insufficient, tying up resources with irrelevant or poorly qualified leads. And the most effective touchpoints in the customer journey remain unknown.
Celonis connects relevant process data and identifies weaknesses in the customer journey. For example, it reveals which touchpoints experience the highest drop-off rates and where the handover of qualified leads to sales stalls. Based on these insights, organisations can adapt campaigns, handover processes and automations in Salesforce with precision and deploy marketing resources more effectively.
The Result: More Transparent Customer Journeys and a Stronger Foundation for Higher Conversion Rates Through Targeted Engagement and Optimised Campaign Management.
Process Intelligence as the Foundation for AI Agents
As AI agents become more widely used, Process Intelligence gains even greater importance. AI needs not only access to data, but also context on how that data is connected and the processes, rules and dependencies behind it.
For example, an AI agent in sales needs to understand which opportunity is involved, which activities have already taken place and which process step is planned next. In customer service, information about customers, contracts, previous enquiries and related processes is relevant.
The Celonis Context Model provides this process and business context across systems. Celonis also supports technologies such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the orchestration of processes in which team members, existing automations and AI agents work together.
Process Intelligence not only helps organisations analyse their processes. It also identifies where AI can be deployed effectively and what context AI agents need to take on tasks within existing business processes.
Why Investing in Celonis Pays Off
Process mining with Celonis closes the gap between planned and actual processes. Data-driven analyses reveal where workflows deviate from the intended process, what causes these deviations and where optimisation potential exists. Combined with Salesforce, this enables you to analyse not only CRM processes but also consider dependencies with upstream and downstream systems.
This enables companies to make more informed decisions about which processes to simplify, standardise or automate. It can save time and costs while helping teams respond to customer enquiries more quickly and create a consistent customer journey.
With AI, Process Intelligence becomes even more important. Instead of providing AI with isolated data alone, organisations can give it the necessary process and business context. This improves the foundation for forecasts, recommendations for action and the deployment of AI agents.
Celonis and Salesforce complement each other in different areas: Salesforce supports core operational customer processes, while Celonis provides transparency into actual workflows and their interdependencies across system boundaries. This gives organisations a sound basis for continuously optimising processes and deploying automation and AI where they deliver the greatest value.
