Celonis SE, a German enterprise software company headquartered in Munich with a secondary base in New York, has appointed former SAP and Deutsche Bank executive Dilipkumar Khandelwal as Chief Customer Officer and Chairman of its India Advisory Board.
Celonis specialises in process mining — a technology that extracts event data from enterprise software such as ERP, CRM and supply-chain systems to reconstruct how work actually happens across an organisation. The platform creates a real-time “digital twin” of business processes, helping companies identify inefficiencies and using AI to suggest or automate improvements.
Khandelwal will be responsible for strengthening global customer success and driving measurable outcomes from process intelligence and AI deployments. He will also guide the company’s India strategy, where Celonis recently opened its Celonis Garage innovation hub in Bengaluru.
“Dilip has built and scaled global teams that serve the world’s most demanding clients. He understands customer challenges intimately and knows how to connect technology to the top, bottom, and green line,” said Carsten Thoma, President and Board Director, Celonis.
Celonis said the appointment is part of its plan to help enterprises derive clear, ongoing value from its Process Intelligence Platform — which integrates with systems like SAP and Salesforce to surface root causes of delays, cost overruns or compliance issues and suggest fixes in real time.
“I look forward to working with our customers and partners to harness the power of process intelligence and AI to move the needle on their most critical business goals,” Khandelwal said. He added that the platform “gives AI the operational context it needs to be effective in the enterprise.”
Khandelwal was previously Managing Director and CEO of Deutsche Bank India, where he led the bank’s technology and operations strategy. Before that, he served as Managing Director of SAP Labs India, playing a key role in expanding the company’s engineering and R&D footprint in the country.
In March this year, Celonis filed a lawsuit against SAP in a U.S. federal court in San Francisco, alleging that the German software giant unlawfully restricted third-party vendors’ access to customer data, a move the company claims affects billions of dollars in commerce.
An engineering graduate from Mumbai University, Khandelwal also holds a management degree from the Indian School of Business.
Founded in 2011 by graduates of the Technical University of Munich, Celonis is considered a pioneer in the process mining category and reached a valuation of around $13 billion in 2022. It employs more than 3,000 people globally.
India is a key market for Celonis. The company said it now operates more than 20 offices worldwide including in Bengaluru and sees India both as a centre for innovation and a base for serving large multinational customers.
