Three ways Energy leaders are generating rapid, sustainable value with Celonis

Ongoing geopolitical shifts and macroeconomic fluctuations have made volatility the baseline for global business. Navigating continuous market uncertainty, leaders across the Energy sector have narrowed their focus to one critical question: "How can we keep products moving and protect bottom-line revenue amidst operational disruption?".

In my previous post, I outlined how leaders are addressing that question by ramping up investments in technologies to boost operational performance. Specifically, they are turning to tools that connect previously siloed functions through a shared language: Process Intelligence. By establishing an objective, system-spanning view of operations, teams can align across departments and take targeted action to protect liquidity, boost productivity and drive top-line revenue.

In this post, we’re going to look at three ways Process Intelligence is being applied to Energy operations in real life — Plant Maintenance, Accounts Payable and Order-to-Cash — with a deeper dive on Plant Maintenance as an Energy-specific use case.

1. Streamlining Plant Maintenance

Energy leaders have long understood the critical need to avoid downtime - particularly unplanned downtime a year (the equivalent of a 1% downtime rate) costs Energy businesses more than five million dollars. Given the current industry climate, there’s never been such an urgent need to improve this metric.

Improving plant maintenance processes - let alone advancing toward predictive maintenance - is inherently complex. Far from operating in a vacuum, maintenance spans upstream, midstream, and downstream operations. It cuts across distinct departments - from Work Order Management, and Inventory to Procurement and AP - each often trapped in separate silos. Because of this fragmentation, standalone BI dashboards, static BPM diagrams, or isolated RPA bots fall short. Churning out more disconnected metrics or automating steps inside broken workflows fails to streamline the actual maintenance lifecycle.

This is why Celonis is such a force multiplier: Unlike a standard BPM tool, Celonis doesn't merely capture static diagrams. Using the Celonis Context Model, it creates a living representation of your business in motion, built directly from your operational reality and connected to your strategy. By uniting real-time operational data across legacy systems with deep institutional knowledge, Celonis delivers the operational clarity needed to analyze, design, and operate AI-driven workflows. This ensures maintenance dispatchers, planners, and autonomous agents can take actions you trust while unlocking value you can prove.

This gives operations teams the clarity to rapidly answer critical operational questions: How is maintenance schedule adherence impacting overall production uptime? Where are material procurement bottlenecks and logistics delays derailing turnaround schedules? What are the true root causes of asset downtime? Armed with that operational ground truth, leaders no longer rely on educated guesses - they gain the clarity to target interventions and take immediate, proven action to protect asset availability.

For example: suppose you need to uncover why your maintenance schedule adherence rate is dropping. The Celonis Platform connects data across your core systems - from asset management in IBM Maximo to ERP workflows in SAP and beyond - and feeds that back into the Celonis Context Model.

By establishing a living representation of your maintenance operations in motion, Celonis illuminates the real-time dependencies between initial maintenance notifications, work order staging, material reservations, and purchase orders. It surfaces structural execution gaps as they emerge, providing the operational clarity and next-best-actions maintenance teams need to intervene before delays compound into downtime.

In this scenario, Celonis might reveal that material availability is the primary driver dragging down schedule adherence. While that insight alone is valuable, the Celonis Context Model goes deeper - surfacing operational hindsight and root causes across interconnected systems.

It exposes that cooling towers and heat exchangers account for the vast majority of deferred work orders. Concurrently, it pinpoints the underlying breakdown: distinguishing whether downtime stemmed from external supplier delivery delays after order placement, or internal friction when Procurement took too long to convert purchase requisitions into POs.

Armed with this level of operational clarity at enterprise scale, teams unlock the ability to act decisively. By orchestrating next-best actions across maintenance planners, procurement teams, and automated triggers, Celonis closes the loop between insight and execution. Rather than reacting to catastrophic failures, operators can proactively resolve staging delays, eliminate unplanned downtime, and compound measurable cost and productivity gains over time.

To learn more about how you can improve process performance in plant maintenance, watch Chevron’s Process Intelligence story, in conversation with Celonis.

2. Catching Duplicate Invoices in Accounts Payable

Energy AP teams use Process Intelligence to analyze transaction flows across enterprise ERP modules (such as SAP) and surface duplicate invoices long before an external audit catches them. By connecting financial data into a continuous operational view, teams catch duplicate payments before the cash leaves the business.

The Celonis Platform detects exact and fuzzy patterns across invoice amounts, vendor records, reference numbers, and posting dates to cluster potential duplicates automatically. Users evaluate flagged items with the help of a machine-learning confidence score, confirming matches with minimal manual investigation. Once verified, automated actions can immediately place payment blocks directly in the source ERP - stopping value leakage in its tracks and training the model to catch similar patterns faster next time.

This captures obvious exact matches - where invoice numbers, amounts, dates, and vendors are identical- as well as subtle duplicates that standard checks overlook. That includes bills submitted twice under slightly different invoice numbers, entries with old due dates, or invoices re-issued with an updated price.

3. Reducing invoicing lead times in Order-to-Cash

In energy, where single transactions routinely run into seven or eight figures, every additional day added to your invoicing lead time can trap tens of millions of dollars in working capital. Yet for organizations navigating diverse product portfolios, specialized trading desks, and tangled global supply chains, identifying where billing cycles stall - let alone resolving the root causes - is notoriously difficult.

That drag usually stems from operating without true end-to-end operational clarity. When transactional workflows cross disparate teams and legacy platforms, leaders cannot pinpoint process deviations, benchmark regional performance, or reliably track critical milestones. Priority metrics - such as custody-transfer ticketing times, billing turnaround, and credit memo or cancellation frequencies - remain buried in disconnected systems.

The Celonis Platform unites every team across the Order-to-Cash chain around the same operational reality. Instead of relying on static reports, trading desks, logistics coordinators, customer operations, and billing teams tap into the Celonis Context Model for live operational clarity.

Teams monitor transactional milestones in real time, pinpointing exactly where custody-transfer tickets stall or billing approvals hit friction. This shared operational truth replaces cross-departmental finger-pointing with direct, coordinated action to shorten billing cycles and unlock working capital.

See how Neste, the world’s largest producer of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel, took the steps outlined above to cut their average invoice lead time in half and create an estimated monthly cash flow impact of 55 million euros.

Drive value from the things you can control with Process Intelligence

Market volatility continues to test the resilience of energy enterprises, but playing it safe by optimizing legacy playbooks is no longer enough. Leaders who pull away won't just streamline existing processes - they will reinvent how work gets done.

With the Celonis Platform, energy organizations unite data across hundreds of disparate systems - from hydrocarbon logistics and asset maintenance to procurement and financial accounting - into a single, dynamic context layer. By pairing operational clarity with the ability to orchestrate trusted action, leaders turn complexity into compounding competitive advantage and prove the value of every operational dollar.

Market uncertainty will continue to test the energy sector, but forward-thinking operators aren't waiting to see how the market unfolds. Armed with operational clarity, predictive foresight, and the ability to act across their core systems, leaders running on the Celonis Platform can navigate volatility with confidence - safeguarding capital, protecting asset uptime, and building a compounding operational advantage that pulls them away from the competition.