realized value
increase in Order Management automation
The next step on their value-building journey? To scale up process mining and process management holistically across their core processes, creating an organizational set-up geared to ongoing optimization. All while laying the foundations for an AI-driven future with process intelligence.
Conrad Electronic’s process optimization journey began in 2021, when the European sourcing platform partnered with Celonis to deliver a proof of value project focusing on the Order-to-Cash (O2C) process. O2C is a major value driver for Conrad, spanning Customer Service, Order Management, Operational Purchasing, and Logistics.
In Customer Service, for example, they deployed process mining to analyze, organize, and reduce the tens of thousands of customer support tickets Conrad received each month due to a lack of process visibility. It was a similar story in warehousing, using the Celonis Platform to understand and minimize returned orders and cancellations.
Resounding success in these use cases provided the impetus to kick off a broader three-year project. This would focus on building an end-to-end perspective of both the O2C and Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) workflows, across multiple departments.
From isolated process intelligence implementations to continuous engagements, the new Celonis initiative targeted sustainable value generation. But it also prepared the ground to catapult a century-old business into the exciting next phase of its development: the AI era.
The major challenge for Conrad was scaling individual process mining successes into lasting, shared, business-wide improvements, while ensuring they had the insight and structures to support AI use cases.
A key aspect was to build on process mining activities by introducing Celonis Process Management (CPM). “We had to scale our process mining and connect it with process management across the company to really create next-level value and understanding,” said Christoph Hohmann, Conrad’s Director of Process Management. As a baseline for ongoing optimization, Christoph’s Center of Excellence (CoE) team set out to document Conrad’s processes.
They needed to capture how the processes should run ideally, compare that with process mining insights on how they actually run, and document process updates. “Documentation is about knowledge sharing and ownership. It's about understanding how things are executed and how sustained value is created within Conrad,” says Christoph.
“And of course, having processes properly documented and analyzed against ideal processes is essential for the roll out of AI use cases”, he adds. Consequently, Conrad have developed an ambitious plan to document every major process by the end of 2026.
Christoph Hohmann, Director of Process Management, Conrad Electronic
“Combining process intelligence and AI at Conrad has huge potential. It’s really important to bring these worlds together so we can improve the efficiency of all the processes we’re executing. We can reduce unnecessary manual interactions and enable high-quality outcomes.”
Conrad also needed to change how process optimization was organized across the business. Previously, individual departments would suggest use cases piecemeal. For successful scale-up, Christoph’s team worked with the wider business to establish process experts within each department. These dedicated experts are familiar with Celonis capabilities and process best practices. Crucially, they’re also responsible for successful process management implementation across their functions.
“It’s about creating an operating model geared to continuous process improvement and collaborative process management,” says Christoph.
Thanks to key insights and action from the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform, Christoph’s team, and the revised operational model for process management, Conrad realized tangible benefits across the business at critical stages of the order lifecycle:
Conrad surfaced nearly 100 reasons for order cancellations using Celonis, allowing the sourcing platform to address those within their control (such as out-of-stock cancellations).
Crucially, Conrad managed to intelligently prioritize open orders using the Open Order Processing App. This involved rolling out user-friendly dashboards to the Customer Care department and setting up daily alerts informing Customer Care agents of open prepayment orders at risk of being cancelled. Another boost to process efficiency and labor productivity came from increasing order-block-processing automation from 40% to 90%.
Conrad used Celonis to analyze the rates at which different product types are returned. Cross-referencing and consolidating this data with the reasons customers sent each item back enabled Christoph’s team to identify and address what caused product returns. Taking action on these insights slashed product return rates, increasing Warehouse Management efficiency.
Conrad identified Celonis AI automation as the ideal tool to tackle their service tickets backlog. AI solutions automatically classified customer inquiries, reducing workload and throughput time. Meanwhile, AI analyzed the reasons behind customers’ inquiries to uncover opportunities to improve customer service and simultaneously reduce unnecessary customer contact. This analysis was rolled out across all departments involved in resolving customer inquiries.
Christoph explains: “Process intelligence is really important to drive AI use cases, to get an understanding of how the process is running and who is executing the different activities. You have to understand the process in the business context to define what kind of AI solution is suitable and link it to the environment in the process.”
As well as identifying levers for change and driving improvements, Conrad has been able to orchestrate and measure the impact of improvement actions within the Celonis Platform. Step-by-step, optimization-by-optimization, team-by-team, Conrad’s organizational set-up is evolving to embrace continuous process improvement.
Speaking of measuring impact, Conrad has realized over €10M in value though Celonis in just three years – earning the CoE team a milestone award.
With strong support for process management from Conrad’s C-suite, the CoE team plans to keep scaling process mining and CPM to other departments and hundreds of new users. They want to connect all processes across their ecosystem in an end-to-end digital twin of business operations. This will allow them to improve and steer processes based on comprehensive, accurate, real-time insights. And they’re also in a stronger position to introduce new AI use cases.
Christoph and his team are shifting the company mindset toward continuous improvement, powered by Celonis. “What we really value about the partnership is being involved in the development of the Platform,” he says. “We have co-innovation projects but also dedicated resources that help us with our daily problems and challenges, jointly driving value creation in the departments.
“We also really value that we have dedicated people supporting our value creation – within the departments but also cooperation with the Center of Excellence. We’re very happy and looking forward to the future.”
Sounds like there’ll be more Celonis process improvement sequels to come at Conrad.
