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Celebrating businesses’ sustainability impact at the Process Earth Sprint 2024
Sustainability is a hot topic in boardrooms worldwide. And it’s only getting hotter as the planet warms up and regulations tighten. Responding to that as a company is hard. Performance data is scattered, goals are set against uncertain futures, and there are numerous competing priorities.
But, as our VP, Global Head of Sustainability Janina Bauer explained at the 2024 Process Earth Sprint, the grand finale of this year’s Celosphere conference, “We all have a secret sustainability superpower: our processes.” Attendees filled the main stage audience to discover just how quickly and effectively businesses can achieve sustainability goals with their processes, watching three teams of process hackers go head to head for the Process Earth crown.
Process champions: The new sustainability heroes?
First, Bauer chaired a panel with process experts to explore how they’re driving progress and why business leaders believe in the value of sustainability initiatives. It featured:
Trina Faigao: SCM head of change management, continuous improvement and regulatory compliance at Hitachi Energy
Daniel Monikes: Supply chain integration manager at Envalior and previous Process Earth winner
Edmund Delussey: Applied advisory services lead at Genpact
“Sustainability” doesn’t feature in their job titles. That’s because they’re process people who prove you can embed sustainability into your day-to-day operations, even if you have multiple additional business priorities.
They shared insight and breakthroughs they’d achieved from recent sustainability projects. Here are three of the highlights.
“Do not underestimate the data”
Faigao discussed an example project that concerned CBAM reporting. She explained how it’s a complicated regulation that requires an understanding of your different data points – not just the company’s internal data, but also external data from suppliers. You therefore need to work closely with them, establish robust processes, and use an automated, scalable solution. The quality, timeliness and accuracy of data are just as important as the availability of it.
“One of the challenges is that tracking data doesn’t just live in one system”
Delussey’s example was the returnable container solution Genpact created for a client. They ship a lot of products and were initially using wooden pallets that have to be disposed of. While sending a reusable container might sound easy, the problem was tracking them. If you send them and don’t retrieve them again, it becomes less sustainable (and costly) to keep reproducing them. But one of the challenges is that tracking data doesn’t just live in one system. It doesn’t sit in your ERP system: it goes through a transportation system, then a client system, and more. Genpact’s solution collated it all together, across these multiple systems, so the client could track their freight.
Read: Genpact Wins 2024 Celonis “Best Use Case Ideation” Award for Sustainable Supply Chain Solution
“With our emissions app, we can really get insights into different transport modes and look for alternatives”
Monikes explained how Envalior has a big footprint in shipping materials all over the world. They wanted to see what emissions they produce in different countries, report on them and find a solution with better logistics. They looked at the material availability for customers’ orders to explore whether they had sufficient time for more sustainable alternatives, such as shipping products by vessel rather than road. Following their success with the project at last year’s Process Earth Sprint, they went on to develop a customizable app with Celonis that enables in-depth insights into their emissions by country, transport mode and other factors. As a result, companies can more easily communicate their sustainability insights with suppliers and customers, spreading impact beyond the company itself.
2024 Process Earth Sprint
The 2024 Process Earth Sprint was a one-day event held in Munich during Celosphere where Celonis customers worked alongside Celonis team members to build real solutions to tackle the most critical sustainability challenges. The teams had just five hours to select a sustainability solution to create, build the solution in Celonis using prepared data models and additional data if necessary, and pitch the solution to a panel of judges. The participants were awarded points on several criteria such their application of KPI measurements, the conceptualization and use of Celonis capabilities like Action Flows and the creativity of their solution. And after all the hard work, it was time to recognize the award winners.
Vanessa Candela, Chief Legal & Trust Officer at Celonis, and Janina Bauer, VP and Global Head of Sustainability at Celonis, kick off Process Earth Sprint at Celosphere 2024.
2024 Process Earth Sprint awards
Runner up: Smurfit Westrock – finding ways of using more sustainable materials
First up was the biggest paper and packaging manufacturer in the world, presenting how they’ve partnered with Celonis to make their business run more smoothly and sustainably. Smurfit Westrock’s aim was to get all their sustainability and emissions data into the system so category managers could see the performance of their suppliers and materials.
The team created dashboards and a cockpit that can enable category managers to compare materials by sustainability performance and also dive deeper into all their suppliers for each material group with all the emissions they’re producing. A custom vendor scorecard comprises reliability, spend, performance and sustainability score in one.
Runner up: Mechatronic drive technology company – cutting procurement emissions
This company makes parts for very precise, advanced machines used in robotics, aerospace, madtech and more. It’s on the cutting-edge of real functional technology – and wants to ensure their business is cutting-edge too. They wanted to look at their whole supply chain – the end-to-end creation of their product.
After identifying the steel and aluminum – materials with high emissions – in their products, they used Process Intelligence to run real-time data through the Material Emissions App and look at the flow from supplier to customer. They learned that many customers use parts with the highest emissions. They can use Celonis to distribute a survey to these customers about their requirements, so they could either redirect them to more sustainable alternatives, or explore creating other solutions.
Read: How industries are pairing AI and process mining to drive transformation
Winner: Leading food logistics company – creating more efficient delivery routes
This company works with some of the world’s largest retailers to give them supply chain, warehousing and webshop solutions that empower their online delivery businesses. They know that agriculture and its adjacent industries are some of the biggest contributors to emissions on the planet. So even with their responsible business practices, there’s more they can do to optimize their logistics.
With their highly custom central fulfillment centers at the heart of their operations, they can streamline the upstream supply chain, source goods directly from their suppliers, store them and dispatch them to customers, all in one building. This achieves a faster time from field to fork, less handling on goods, and saves on food waste. But as a proportion of their overall model, the delivery section is much larger – a prime area for optimization.
Electrification of their fleet is therefore their long-term goal for sustainability. They want to use Celonis to identify which vehicles they should target first. But their short-term priority is improving how they service their customers right now.
The app they built with Celonis displays total emissions, as well as those per vehicle type, route and order. They can then select the customer addresses they want to focus on in poor-performing routes, and send them for rezoning to a different fulfillment center. Rather than assuming that the most local fulfillment center is the best choice, for example, this objective, data-driven insight helps them reduce the overall emissions to reach customers.
The company came away victorious after receiving the loudest cheers and applause from our audience. Their prize? Bragging rights, a beautiful trophy, and time with our implementation teams to help turn their concept into a real-world solution, which we can’t wait to see.
Making processes work
At Celonis, our mission is to make processes work for people, companies and the planet. With the help of our champions, the Process Earth Sprint showcased how Process Intelligence can help solve global sustainability challenges while driving growth and value for our customers.
