Real customer successes: 4 tried-and-true tactics to build a more sustainable supply chain

Sustainable supply chain management is also increasingly becoming the subject of legislative mandates, such as the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) or the USA’s Federal Sustainability Plan. It’s vital to meet customer expectations, with a Deloitte survey finding that 32% of consumers trust brands more if they have a transparent, accountable, and socially and environmentally responsible supply chain. And green-line gains can also lead to bottom-line benefits — cutting down inefficiencies in your pursuit for more sustainable operations can naturally generate cost savings. So, whether you’re an avowed environmentalist or simply an efficiency enthusiast, greater supply chain sustainability is also great for business.

Supply chain sustainability efforts are becoming easier with the help of Process Intelligence. Not only can it give you visibility into what’s really going on throughout your supply chain operations — it also provides actionable insights to improve sustainability, and dedicated apps to help you actually pull off sustainable supply chain changes.

Here are four of the many ways Celonis customers are using Process Intelligence to drive their sustainability practices – and how you can do the same.

1. Reducing bottlenecks, tightening lead times, and reducing stock with the help of process visibility

The challenge most companies face when trying to drive sustainable supply chain management? The gap between lofty, idealistic ESG targets and real-world execution. You need process visibility to close that gap.

Using the power of the Celonis Process Intelligence Graph, Celonis customers can analyze supply chain processes to understand exactly where sustainability opportunities are hiding, and how to capture them.

According to Vijay Purohit, IT Director of Corporate Functions & Automation at Reckitt, Process Intelligence gave “an end-to-end view of our value chain and where we can also nudge…the sustainability indexes.” Process Intelligence enables companies like Reckitt to pinpoint areas holding back supply chain sustainability, such as bottlenecks or delays that create waste.

Sealing manufacturer Freudenberg zeroed in on one area where visibility can also have unexpected sustainability benefits: their lead times. They wanted to produce goods faster and adapt production processes to meet customers’ sustainability requirements. To do this, they used the End-to-End Leads Times app to examine their lead times at the material and plant combination level, so that they could better understand the financial implications of those lead times, as well as find ways to manufacture goods more sustainability and replace raw materials with more sustainable ones.

Sustainable app spotlight: When it comes to optimizing processes for sustainability and efficiency, Celonis’ End-to-End Lead Times app provides a holistic view of the supply chain by centralizing data across all processes to give realistic lead-time predictions, then generating actionable insights to help make lead times leaner. For example, with more reliable lead times, companies can avoid holding excess safety stock, helping enterprises act more sustainably by ordering and producing only what’s needed.

Read more: End-to-end lead times and why they matter to your supply chain

Freudenberg was able to use the app to maintain lower materials on stock and identify high-impact opportunities for efficiency. They also reduced working capital and lead times by about 10% across the business, letting them focus more on driving sustainability. Per Kai Fürher, the company’s Director of Global Supply Chain Controlling: “I’ve worked in supply chain for 20 years. This level of transparency has never been possible. With this end-to-end transparency, we can find ways to act faster and be more flexible.” We couldn’t agree more.

2. Choosing more sustainable suppliers through comprehensive process insights

Another benefit that Purohit and the Reckitt team have found from Process Intelligence is the ability to more easily select sustainable vendors. Reckitt can “identify the vendor that can give a much more sustainable target compared to any other supplier with a similar profile,” per Purohit.

Similarly, Heidelberg Materials uses the Celonis Sustainable Spend Management App to ensure they’re picking suppliers that align with their ESG goals.

Sustainable app spotlight: The Sustainable Spend Management app consolidates supplier sustainability data so teams can evaluate and prioritize based on risk, rating coverage, and specific ESG criteria, and can even automate much of the manual ongoing action required in supplier sustainability reviews, including requesting ratings and triggering reassessment when the expiration date is approaching.

Read more: Operationalize sustainable Procurement with the Celonis Sustainable Spend Management app

Heidelberg teams are using the app to speed up sorting and selection of over 120,000 vendors — making what would previously be gargantuan sustainability project significantly more manageable.

3. Using Process Intelligence to get granular about supply chain emissions

One of the most fundamental sustainability goals? Emissions. They’ve historically been hard to precisely measure at scale, and can be even harder to reduce. But, with the power of Process Intelligence, Celonis customers have been able to both understand and begin cutting down their emissions.

Celonis can help enterprises curb their:

• Emissions from material selection, through quantifying the sustainability of purchased materials and ensuring sustainable materials are more easily identified and selected
• Inbound shipping emissions, through real-time detection and quantification of unsustainable shipping practices and subsequent process improvements to increase efficiency
• Outbound shipping emissions, using the same tactics as inbound, plus order bundling for maximized capacity, improved routes to curtail unnecessary freight, and rush order reduction to head off air freight or empty vehicles

How does all of this look in practice?

Take Global specialty chemicals provider Archroma as an example. They used Celonis Process Intelligence to quantify the carbon emissions of more than 150,000 shipments through real-time detection and quantification of key emission sources.

Process Intelligence revealed opportunities to reduce emissions, offering systematic, targeted automations.

Sustainable app spotlight: The Celonis Shipping Emissions Reduction app compiles logistics and emissions data, simulates the impact of different transport methods and routes, and can provide recommendations on the most carbon-optimized options. This offloads a lot of the guesswork and manual effort in decision-making around sustainable supply chain management.

In less than 12 months, Archroma was able to pinpoint major contributors to its global shipping network’s carbon footprint, and Archroma now has a performance baseline for outbound shipping emissions. This kind of global supply chain data isn’t easy for most businesses to find, much less use, but with Celonis, it’s now a central pillar of Archroma’s emission reduction measures. They’ve been able to reduce their emissions by more than 6% (and counting) thus far.

Want to do the same? You can replicate Archroma’s steps using the Shipping Emissions Reduction app deployed within the Celonis platform.

Read more: Building a product to reduce emissions with every process step

In addition to reducing emissions, Archroma has used Process Intelligence to “help our customers make more sustainable choices when it comes to selecting products and shipping routes,” per Chief Sustainability Officer Danielle Blomert.

The company needed granular CO2 emissions data on each product throughout the shipping cycle so they could answer a growing number of customer inquiries about their carbon footprint and environmental impact. Archroma focused on tracking outbound shipping emissions in the search for opportunities to improve their environmental impact, such as decreasing carbon emissions by optimizing shipments. Using insights about the weight of shipments and truck capacity utilization, Archroma found opportunities to bundle shipments, lowering both costs and emissions. The company was also able to strengthen customer relationships by sharing this product emissions data.

4. Creating process-driven sustainability solutions tailored to specific industries

Interested in a more bespoke approach? Many Celonis customers are using Process Intelligence to investigate and create more opportunities for sustainability within their unique supply chains.

Lufthansa Group got creative with the Celonis Process Intelligence platform when it came to reducing emissions: in collaboration with Deloitte, the Group’s subsidiary Lufthansa CityLine used Celonis to uncover that they could reduce their carbon footprint through optimizing their fuel-to-order processes.

Fuel orders for flights are variable and influenced by many factors, like weight and weather — meaning that any number of last-minute changes can impact the amount of fuel needed for a flight. Lufthansa CityLine and Deloitte used a digital twin of the company’s fuel-to-order process to better understand how things were really running, identifying where, when and why fuel overestimations were occurring.

They discovered that fuel over-ordering largely came from crews not having the most up-to-date information about their flights. In one example, a Lufthansa crew with more up-to-date flight info could save 96 kilos of fuel with a more accurate fuel order; multiplied over Lufthansa Cityline’s thousands of flights each month, you can imagine the massive impact that more accurate fuel ordering has on Lufthansa’s fuel consumption!