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Bridging the gaps: How Celonis drives a predictable supply chain with Process Intelligence and AI
Supply chains in today’s global economy are incredibly complex—involving global operations, numerous distribution hubs, and countless handoffs between diverse stakeholders.
A supply chain is essentially a mega-process made of lots of connected micro-processes like procurement, order management, transportation, and warehousing. Unfortunately, these processes often operate in siloed systems—they don’t talk to one another, causing a disconnect. When different functional teams work in isolation, it leads to a lack of transparency, making it difficult to pinpoint and resolve inefficiencies. Businesses also face competing priorities, such as balancing service levels with working capital.
During Celonis Process Intelligence Day in New York City, Celonis Supply Chain Solution Architect CJ Schletter and Associate Principal Product Manager Sahir Jiwani hosted the roundtable Connect your people, process, and technology to drive a more predictable supply chain where they explored the supply chain challenges that today’enterprises face and how the Celonis Process Intelligence platform acts as a command center for the supply chain.
Process-led supply chain transformation
During the discussion, business leaders in IT, consulting, and more shared their most pressing supply chain concerns. Among their specific use cases, a central theme emerged: they need end-to-end, cross-functional transparency and visibility of their supply chain. For example, one attendee said her organization needs a way to better balance inventory across its warehouses to avoid customer penalties (some as high as 3%) if orders are not fulfilled on-time and in-full (OTIF). On-time delivery was also top-of-mind for another participant as well as lead-time forecasting. Her company needed a more scalable way to manage the difference between their internal OTIF standards and the “huge gap” in all the different customer standards, which sometimes means pulling data from 1,500 sources on a daily basis.
Celonis gives you end-to-end visibility across your supply chain and helps you contain costs, optimize cash, and improve service levels in a balanced way, without unintended consequences. Consider a scenario where a supplier shipment to your business is delayed: Is it carrying critical inventory? If so, what’s the impact on your sales orders, and what can you do to address it? With Celonis as your supply chain command center you can harmonize data from all your different systems—enterprise resource planning (ERP), transportation management systems (TMS), warehouse management systems (WMS), customer relationship management (CRM), and more. This process data is combined with business context (i.e., what makes something uniquely good or bad for your businesses) to create a digital twin of your operations. It’s system-agnostic, unbiased and updated in real time. Team members can take action to address situations like the one described above directly from the Celonis platform or use it to trigger actions in other systems—using Celonis Action Flows and Orchestration Engine. For example, they could locate and send excess stock from one location to another that needs it.
Celonis can be leveraged to tackle these other use cases such as:
Reducing stockouts. Celonis can identify alternate sources of stock and prioritize them based on impact.
Reallocate excess inventory. Stock can be transferred from locations with excess to ones at risk of stockout, factoring in time and cost restraints.
Reduce operating costs. Businesses can leverage existing freight and logistics with Celonis to meet demand.
To evolve a supply chain that performs under pressure, you need a shared understanding of how it all really runs, end-to-end, and across functions. That’s where Celonis comes in–enabling AI across supply chains to optimize use cases with products like:
Supplier Inquiry Agent: Increase automated supplier inquiry responses with AI Agents, cutting request backlogs, enhancing supplier relationships, and enabling a more efficient labor force.
Material Availability Co-Pilot: Reduce excess inventory by enabling plant technicians to easily find nearby warehouses with spare parts they can use.
Issue identification and remediation: Reduce production interruptions by helping shop floor analysts quickly identify and remediate issues.
Backorder Assistant: Use a Large Language Mode (LLM) to provide AI-driven backorder recommendations to reduce delays.
Optimize your supply chain with Celonis
The Celonis Supply Chain Solution Suite provides everything customers need to bring the power of AI and PI to their supply chains. Introduced at our Celonis:Next product showcase, it includes apps designed to optimize inventory management, procurement, order management, and logistics and transportation. It also includes AI-driven solutions to address custom supply chain challenges. For example, the Network Explorer enables businesses to see how different business objects (customers, companies, orders, and invoices, for example) impact each other across your business—and filter those objects by country, material, plant, and several other categories. Our Optimization Engine: To help customers address multi variable, multi decision challenges, we released the Celonis Optimization Engine which allows users to develop optimization models to improve any business objective while taking into account the organization's specific constraints and decision variables. This allows you to generate solutions to complex, business-specific challenges.
Read more about how the Celonis Process Intelligence platform is transforming supply chain management and optimizing processes:
Celonis for tariff management: Navigating supply chain disruptions with Process Intelligence
How AI is already working for supply chains–and how it will grow in the future
