“We found a multimillion dollar impact on our P&L just from the initial deployments in AR,” said TJ Young, Sr. Manager, Process Intelligence Strategy & Engagement at Mars, speaking at the event.
Also see: Celonis World Tour 2022: Everything you need to know
TJ Young, Sr. Manager, Process Intelligence Strategy & Engagement at Mars
When Mars first started using Celonis process mining and automation technology, the company had three objectives; reduce deduction inflow, increase recovery rates and cut cycle times.
Investment in Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) began in early 2021 and the platform has been used to minimize leakage and enforce greater control and compliance across Accounts Receivable (A/R) through Deductions and Invoice-to-Cash.
In January 2022, Mars created the Process Intelligence Hub (PIH), an internal group of four people led by Young that enables the use of process mining and task mining solutions across the company at scale.
The PIH focuses on the following areas:
- Strategy & Core Roadmap
- Platform Management
- Vendor Management & Partnerships
- Discovery & Deployment
- Solution Governance Standards
- Value Realization Methodology
The PIH created a framework to “ensure value realization while expanding the use of Celonis across business functions around the globe”.
During the first phase, Young and team focuses on business engagement, doing roadshows and platform demos, identifying potential strategic partners with a market scan and developing proofs of concept.
Next, the team moves into value identification. They will perform a value tree analysis, quantify the potential business impact of a new implementation, do a feasibility assessment and prioritize use cases.
The third and final phase of the process is value realization. Here the team focuses on producing a business case, getting P&L commitment and stakeholder sign-off, and tracking the charter and benefits.
In March 2022 with the PIH in place, Mars expanded the use of Celonis to Mars Petcare, which focuses on pet nutrition, veterinary care, diagnostics and more through brands such as Iams, Eukanuba, AniCura, Linnaeus, Asia Veterinary Diagnostics and others. The company operates over 2,500 veterinary hospitals around the globe.
Mars Petcare is using Celonis with Order-to-Cash (O2C) to reduce leakage by “identifying Three-Way-Match discrepancies to proactively fix issues before invoicing occurs and to increase “efficiency and working capital by identifying opportunities in real time to combine outbound shipments together with the same destination.”
Up next the Mars PIH team is continuing to promote adoption of process mining and task mining technology throughout the company, handling change management, federating their model and scaling the practice.
"We want people to start to use the tool to operationalize this into their daily operations," said Young. "We want to make sure conversations start with Celonis."