Using Celonis as a supply chain control tower
Global businesses such as Siemens and Hexion are already using Celonis to increase supply chain resilience, and the platform is ideal as a supply chain control tower. Advanced process mining technology enables enterprises to create a supply chain digital twin which shows – at a very granular transactional level – what is taking place across every single link in the supply chain.
These insights can then be elevated to understand and communicate what is happening at any level, and combined with AI and process knowledge to make informed decisions about what to do next. We call this Process Intelligence. Read our article on Process Intelligence in the supply chain, to find out more.
Three areas where Celonis excels as a supply chain control tower are visibility, collaboration and automation.
Cross-functional visibility
Celonis provides a level of supply chain visibility that goes far beyond the static information provided – largely without context – by standard business intelligence and data analytics tools, and allows businesses to see what is happening across functions. As Miranda explains:
“In a control tower you are dealing with cross-functional elements like inventory management, customer service and logistics. It's not just about pulling all the data together and showing it side by side. There's more to it as there are dependencies across each of them. That’s where Celonis plays a very important role because we're linking all these processes together and providing additional insights beyond just the pure data point or KPI result.”
This cross-functional visibility is enabled by object-centric process mining (OCPM), an advanced form of process mining that allows businesses to visualize how processes interrelate and interconnect across the entire organization. OCPM provides a common language, not just across functions but across disparate systems that might all represent the same function in different ways.
Effective collaboration
Once businesses have true visibility into supply chain disruption and the impact across all functions, responding to those disruptions with corrective action will inevitably involve an element of collaboration. Miranda gives changing shipments as a simple example.
“If I need to rearrange my shipments, I cannot do that blindly because I need to check with the destination location to make sure they have docking capacity for me to make that change. Different teams and functions of the supply chain often need to collaborate before the final solution is found.”
In addition to providing cross-functional visibility, Celonis also enables supply chain collaboration by serving as a platform where different functions can work together to solve problems or drive improvements.
Ongoing automation
Miranda doesn't believe supply chains will ever be fully autonomous, humans will always need to be in the loop. But, individual elements within our supply chains will increasingly be automated.
One of these areas is the detection of potential disruptions, which is becoming less reactive and more proactive due to technologies like AI and predictive analytics. According to Miranda, “because we have a very granular and detailed view of operations we can start building trends on the behavior that we see in the execution of operations. We can start detecting and prioritizing risks much earlier.”
What’s more, corrective action to mitigate risk and minimize the impact of disruption can also be automated. Once businesses have full visibility of the issue, deciding what to do about it can be a manual or automated process. When a control tower has access to all the knowledge and context it can automatically work through numerous different options to find the optimal resolution, and potentially trigger an RPA bot to execute action.
