Konica Minolta captures O2C value with Genpact and Celonis

With a Celonis Center of Excellence already in place, and the platform used across five countries, Konica Minolta may seem well advanced in its value realization journey. But there’s always more to be achieved.

Claudius Schönherr, Senior Process Manager at Konica Minolta Business Solutions recently took to the Celosphere 2023 stage with Michael Gordon, Digital Transformation Director at Genpact. They shared three top lessons they’ve learned so far, and how they’re set to build new business cases.

A bottom-up beginning

Konica Minolta’s Celonis story began in 2021, when an employee in the Netherlands suggested using the technology to improve the order-to-cash process. Konica Minolta then chose to work with Genpact, a Celonis platinum partner that has its own accelerators and homegrown apps for Celonis. With the help of Genpact’s process analysts and engineers, Konica Minolta implemented Celonis.

Schönherr described Celonis as, "a great tool to support corporate leadership just because it creates transparency over a whole fragmented organization with different processes and different ERP systems."

Having proved the value of Celonis by optimizing the order-to-cash process in the Netherlands and Belgium, the next step was to set up a Celonis Center of Excellence (CoE) with Genpact in 2022.

Use of the platform in order-to-cash was then expanded to the United Kingdom, France and (most recently) Spain. The company is seeing six-figure value realization across its order-to-cash processes, including big leaps forward in touchless order rates.

CoEs, the C-suite, and costs – learning valuable lessons

Some of the key learnings discussed in the session:

1. The value of the CoE setup

Back in 2022, Schönherr felt it too early to set up a Center of Excellence. But in hindsight it was absolutely the right thing to do.

He explained how, with Genpact support, the CoE enabled Konica Minolta to put proper governance and a mission statement behind the initiative, as well as to set up roles and responsibilities, which has been invaluable moving forward.

2. The importance of C-level involvement

Getting high level buy-in for process improvement is vital, but can be tricky when processes are far removed from the C-suite’s attention.

Konica Minolta has a steering board as part of its CoE. Board members include: the CIO, the CFO, the head of the enterprise project and process management division, the head of supply chain, and representatives from the Genpact team.

This means investment in process improvement not only receives C-suite support, it undergoes the kind of scrutiny that leads to the creation of strong business cases.

3. The benefit of measuring value

Schönherr stressed the importance of setting measurable goals, and then tracking progress as well as costs – while always making both as transparent as possible. He explained:

"Celonis is the perfect tool to measure its own success because you can just implement analysis which tells you at any given time where you are in terms of process improvement."

He also reflected on the benefits that are harder to measure, such as overall transparency. Schönherr explained how Celonis and Genpact help Konica Minolta break down silos and get people together to discuss process quality and openly share ideas for improvement. He said:

"I’m excited about how easy it is to get people from different countries at one table discussing process quality. You think they might be playing hide-and-seek and not being honest but that’s absolutely not the case."

Demand is increasing

Almost three years on, Konica Minolta’s approach to process improvement is still part-driven from the bottom up. Schönherr explained that teams have needed time to get used to the possibilities opened up by Celonis and all the data it makes available and usable. Now, he said, they are coming forward with more and more requests and the CoE is working hard to deliver on them, assuming there is a strong business case. In fact, business subject matter experts are the main promoters of the system – always a healthy indicator of engagement.

The team, he went on, still finds ways to use Celonis to support the business. Sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, when a merger in one country resulted in conflicting opinions about how to approach a process quality issue, or whether to address it at all. By presenting the situation clearly, with all the figures available, an issue that would otherwise have taken months to clarify was resolved almost immediately.