5 ways to supply-chain operational excellence with Process Intelligence

Supply chain operational excellence can be a fiddly business. Rather than being made of a simple, single process, supply chains are an intricate network of myriad connected micro-processes. And this makes them vulnerable: an impact on one process ripples out to others.

Supply chain operational excellence can be a fiddly business. Rather than being made of a simple, single process, supply chains are an intricate network of myriad connected micro-processes. And this makes them vulnerable: an impact on one process ripples out to others.

To build your supply chain’s resilience and troubleshoot issues impeding your operational excellence, you need to see exactly what’s going on across all of your processes.

That’s where Celonis Process Intelligence comes in. Using process mining , it builds a digital twin of your supply chain — and all its links — to show you the inner workings of your organization. The Celonis Process Intelligence Platform acts as a common language for how your business is running, connecting you to your processes, your teams to each other, and emerging technologies to your business.

To understand how Process Intelligence can help you balance containing costs, optimizing cash, and improving service levels within your supply chain, get familiar with some of the strongest supply chain management use cases so that you can target areas where you’ll see the greatest return.

We’ve picked five that show Process Intelligence's varied applications for continuous improvement throughout your supply chain enterprise.

1. Make inventory management more seamless and accurate

Process Intelligence might equip you with a comprehensive, end-to-end view of your processes, but changing up your entire supply chain in one go isn’t the wisest strategy. We’d recommend initially focusing on a specific area where you’ll see substantial, tangible process improvement: Inventory Management.

After the sudden disruption of COVID-19, most industries are looking to minimize the risk of being ambushed by anything like it again. Many businesses were either caught out and left with stock shortages, or saddled with too much inventory to shift.

Process Intelligence brings these vulnerabilities to light. Using a digital twin to objectively, accurately map your Inventory Management processes, it uncovers where stock is building up, as well as where you’re at risk of stockout, and then lets you take action to combat this. Introducing intelligent automation can take these quick wins further by reallocating excess to areas at risk of stockouts, and accurately updating safety stock levels.

All of this eases the pressures on your entire supply chain. Reducing waste not only contains costs, but also supports sustainability targets. Keeping stock at the right level optimizes working capital while improving your service levels. Everything's kept in balance.

2. Manage disruption with a supply chain control tower

Another way to drive operational excellence and mitigate supply chain disruption is by using Process Intelligence as a control tower. Control tower technologies analyze process data for trends (including risks), anticipating issues so you can proactively avoid them.

The purpose of control towers is to give visibility across your supply chain planning and into how each process within it is operating, and that’s exactly what Process Intelligence gives you: a living digital twin of your supply chain processes, so you can inspect in close detail exactly how each function relates to and impacts other dependencies.

With Process Intelligence, you have a much more evolved understanding of your supply chain processes — because when you can zoom out for a more holistic view (rather than focusing on narrower views where you might previously have only seen risks within a particular function), you can better understand what action to take.

Process Intelligence can also be the connective tissue of your organization in this way. By working from a shared, end-to-end view of your supply chain processes, different functions and departments can more easily collaborate to overcome issues, using Process Intelligence helping to automate much of the risk-detection and course-correction. Taking transport and logistics as an example, Process Intelligence can use your process data to assess carrier performance and prioritize scheduling to avoid shipment delays.

3. Use Celonis Process Intelligence for supply chain automation

Process Intelligence doesn't only provide powerful, process-contextual insights to help you achieve supply chain operational excellence. The Celonis Process Intelligence platform can also apply those insights through automation.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) sits at the simpler end of the automation spectrum. RPA bots perform rules-based tasks and processes, like the stock-checking and shipment-tracking that underpins supply chain management. Anything involving repeated steps can be taken off your hands, such as inputting and collating supply chain data into inventory reports, or processing orders with fewer errors.

If your business is ready for more complex types of automation, the Celonis Process Intelligence platform can also be used to create and manage Action Flows. Orchestrating processes at a workflow level, Action Flows use alerts and real-time process data that trigger actions, for which they might call upon RPAs. This means you’ve not just got the micro-processes set up and running for you, but you also have AI helping to proactively circumvent potential issues with automatic detection and resolution. And for all their sophistication, you might be surprised to see just how easy Action Flows are to set up.

Automating with Process Intelligence can accelerate supply chain management and efficiency — essential for protecting service levels with prompt issue-resolution — with formidably well-oiled processes.

4. Improve returns and reverse logistics

With attention usually focused on order fulfillment, businesses often overlook how they manage orders flowing in the opposite direction: from customers back to them. Inefficient return processes can harm customer relationships and incur unnecessary costs.

With Process Intelligence to show you how your return processes run, you get a clearer picture of the burden returns have on your supply chain systems and functions — and a better understanding of how to lower it.

The visibility and insights from Process Intelligence can actually help cut returns if they’re due to supply chain issues such as over-long shipping or incorrect items. You’ll be able to precisely target where snags, delays, and unreliable suppliers and carriers lie, creating a virtuous cycle: The more you improve your processes, the more efficient your entire supply chain becomes, and the fewer returns you receive, and the less burden your business experiences.