Celonis customers in 2022 focused on efficiency, agility and scaling process excellence to better navigate a host of challenges ranging from inflation to supply chain transformation and sustainability.
Dr. Detlef Kayser, Member of the Executive Board, Fleet & Technology at Lufthansa Group, summed up 2022 during the Celonis Celosphere 2022 keynote: "What you hear in the news, you'll see in your operations a few minutes later.”
Here’s a look at what we learned from dozens of Celonis customer stories in 2022.
Numerous Celonis customers focused on working capital improvements in 2022 amid supply chain disruptions, inflation and business volatility. At Celosphere 2022, BSH Appliance Group outlined how process excellence improved working capital and other business functions. The BSH Appliance Group presentation focused on working capital improvement projects that improve cash flow and help BSH Appliance Group navigate inflation, supply chain disruptions and fluctuations in demand.
Avnet had a similar story. Avnet has integrated Celonis into many departments — including Procurement, Sales, and Finance — to deliver €10-15M of value year-on-year in working capital impact, productivity gains and revenue increases.
Simply put, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable use cases were more important than ever.
Not surprisingly, supply chain was a big issue in 2022 amid disruption, price volatility and inventory swings. Celonis customers leveraged process mining and execution management to navigate the volatility.
Reckitt Chief Information and Digitization Officer Filippo Catalano said the company has been "profoundly affected" by supply chain volatility and Celonis is an enabler to manage through those challenges. "The supply chain has been super volatile," said Catalano.
At the New York stop of Celonis World Tour 2022, Vini Cardoso, Global Tech Finance Director at AB InBev, shared supply chain use cases including fraud detection. "We start with raw materials that are delivered by thousands of trucks on a daily basis," said Cardoso. Having end-to-end visibility into our supply chain is "very important in our case."
ALDI SÜD has launched its first real-time Celonis Execution Management app for its daily supply chain process performance as part of its broader digital transformation efforts.
Meanwhile, Eurowings leveraged process mining to get a better understanding of its supply chain and value chain as it restarted following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Multiple customers are melding sustainability and supply chain process excellence. Multiple processes in supply chain, logistics and procurement also apply to sustainability goals.
A quick tour of sustainability efforts from customers:
Celonis customers shared best practices for CoEs and scaling process excellence. While approaches differ by company, customers were unanimous that some centralized function needs to partner with business units to deliver value, collaborate and continuously improve.
Here’s a look at the CoE at scale best practices:
And other approaches at various enterprises.
Celonis customers also have been looking for automation opportunities across processes via Celonis Execution Management System (EMS). The journey toward automation accelerated in 2022.
Process digital twins were a hot topic among customers. One customer had 15 deployed. Others were building process digital twins and noted that the addition of Celonis Process Sphere (a Celonis EMS capability built on object-centric process mining) will help scale the efforts. Credibom presented its digital twin and process simulation efforts.
Lufthansa Group’s Kayser said process intelligence has to operate at scale at a company that conducts 2,600 flights a day. The processes behind Lufthansa must adapt to everything from airspace capacity during conflicts, regulation, weather, airport infrastructure and safety.
Lufthansa is currently standardizing data ingestion and harmonizing it, creating digital twins of operations, and feeding a solution generator that can adapt to multiple scenarios for crew, aircraft, passengers, and dispatch.
iFood, Brazil's dominant delivery service, has racked up multiple wins with Celonis Execution Management System and Process Mining and plans to further scale by simulating processes, leveraging a data-driven culture and eliminating bottlenecks in its ecosystem.
Autodesk is typical of most large enterprises in that it has multiple ERP systems. Process mining is used to provide visibility throughout system migrations and to maintain data integrity. Autodesk saved about four to six weeks during its system migration and also caught 15 critical engineering defects in the connections between the old and new ERP systems.
Jean-Marc Erieau, Director Process Mining & Execution Management MANN+HUMMEL Group also noted the importance of systems transformation at Celosphere 2022:
"We combined our S4/HANA transformation with Celonis. We are already cleaning up processes with Celonis and that applies to the SAP systems transformation. Celonis is giving us full transparency on what is happening globally. Celonis for us is part of our strategic picture for 2027."
Global manufacturer Saint-Gobain put Celonis to work across the 120 internal audit missions it conducts each year. Celonis and Data Analytics have helped to reduce the length of each by up to two weeks, saving more than 4.5 years of time, and have transformed the perception of audit from ‘policeman to business partner’.
At Celonis World Tour 2022 New York, Nationwide and Wells Fargo outlined how they leveraged process mining and risk management to deliver value. Jason Burchwell, Vice President of Internal Audit at Nationwide, said process mining will become a key tool for auditors and risk management at the company. "What does the auditor of the future look like? It will be a digital auditor that views process mining as a key cornerstone," said Burchwell.
"We are marrying process mining with the risk management systems that have information with real operational events," said Jeremy Bastacky, Senior Lead Business Execution Consultant at Wells Fargo. "With process mining you can put together a picture to build the value proposition."
