How Borusan Cat streamlines accounts receivable and accelerates transformation with Celonis

H.Özlem Caymaz, Borusan Cat CFO, described the use of Celonis in AR as a paradigm shift for the company. "The accounts receivable project sparked a cultural revolution, intertwining automation and agile principles to unlock unparalleled productivity,” she said.

The Borusan Group, the parent company of Borusan Cat, will celebrate its 80th anniversary in 2024 and is on a journey to become a 200-year-old company. To realize this vision, the company is investing in new technologies, like Celonis, that drive digital transformation and offer not-only quick wins but support the company’s long-term strategy of putting sustainability at the center of Borusan’s operations.

Beginning in 2021 and continuing through 2023, Borusan Cat's digital transformation efforts have been the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. In 2022, a total of 150 Harvard students conducted case analyses, examining the company's success using cutting-edge technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence and robotic process automation) and their business model that prioritizes the sustainability of the workforce.

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Delivering tangible value in accounts receivable

As part of these broader digital transformation efforts, Borusan Cat was looking for a way to improve several key accounts receivable (AR) metrics, including on-time payment rate, days sales outstanding (DSO) and invoice creation time. Beyond a one-time-fix, they also wanted to proactively monitor their processes and automatically trigger targeted action when necessary. Unfortunately, they lacked a way to systematically analyze their processes, which made identifying hidden friction points a time-consuming and effort-intensive task.

“Identifying root causes, analyzing processes holistically across different locations and subsidiaries, and conducting performance comparisons posed a real challenge for us,” said Cüneyt Uğur, Process Automation Leader with Borusan Cat.

In 2022, the company deployed Celonis and was able to deliver tangible value in just a few months. By automating dealer invoices, they saved over a 100 human-days of work and enabled proactive monitoring of the process. They were able to generate real-time customer analytics, which let them track activities such as deadlines and payments, improve customer communications and enhance the team’s overall effectiveness. Specifically, the Accounting team was able to use several new dashboards and automations to track KPIs such as overall cycle time, invoice creation time and invoice clearing time in near real-time.

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Cüneyt Uğur, Process Automation Leader with Borusan Cat

“As part of Borusan Cat’s Digital & Technology department, we operate with a business-driven model,” said Uğur. “In addition to bringing, disseminating and enabling technologies, we have a responsibility to create value and were particularly focused on the ‘value creation’ aspect of the AR project.”

Changing the way Borusan does business

Ugur told me that the process intelligence delivered by Celonis has fundamentally altered how they do business. “The findings from the AR project have led to the initiation of a separate project, under the sponsorship of the CFO, to assess and improve the entire Finance process," he said.

Based on the successful value creation of the AR project, Borusan is now using Celonis for order-to-cash (O2C) and lead-to-cash (L2C) in addition to AR. They are also expanding their use of Celonis to operations outside of Türkiye to five additional countries.

Borusan is also using Celonis to improve their equipment servicing operations. “Our customers have no tolerance for downtime of their machines or projects,” Ugur said. “Thus, planning service and supplying optimum support is crucial for us.” Borusan’s service teams use a mobile application called WeKing to perform “technician planning, tracking and reporting.” Celonis is being used to monitor this “after-the-sale” process and infuse the app with process intelligence.

The company’s use of Celonis was also the basis of an academic case study presented at the Process Querying, Manipulation, and Intelligence 2023 (PQMI 2023) conference. The case study, “Analyzing After-Sales Service Process Using Object-Centric Process Mining: A Case Study,” was presented by Gyunam Park, Sevde Aydin, Cüneyt Uğur and Wil van der Aalst, Chief Scientist at Celonis. It was the result of an academic collaboration between RWTH Aachen University’s Process and Data Science Group (PADS) and Borusan Cat - R&D, Digital and Technology. PQMI 2023 is a gathering for academics and practitioners to exchange insights on process querying, manipulation and intelligence.