Fujitsu + Celonis

Fujitsu uses Celonis to gain full transparency into inventory levels and AI-enhanced recommendations about when to stock-up, re-allocate, and refrain from buying materials.

Making the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation – that’s the ambitious purpose of Fujitsu. One of the world’s oldest technology companies, Fujitsu has a long history of reinvention and resilience. Well-known for its hardware solutions, Fujitsu recently set out on a new journey: delivering world-class IT and digital transformation services.

To do that successfully, Fujitsu started with itself. “Over the past few years, global uncertainty and the speed of change have increased dramatically,” explains Kazushi Koga, Corporate Executive Officer, SEVP, Head of Platform, Fujitsu. “To keep up with this rapid pace, it is crucial to use accurate real-time data and incorporate new technologies like AI, so we can develop data-driven strategies.” That ambition led Fujitsu to starting the FUJITRA project (short for Fujitsu Transformation) five years ago.

Facts over feelings: Making Fujitsu’s processes transparent

A major part of Fujitra is “One Fujitsu” – the streamlining and unifying of systems alongside the promotion of data-driven management across the company. Under the leadership of Koga-san, Fujitsu Japan originally implemented Celonis as a transparency tool within the One Support motion of Fujitra. Combining Process Intelligence and AI, Celonis created for Fujitsu a living digital twin of its business operations, showing how its processes ran and revealing ways to make them work better.

“Emergency shipping was very expensive”, remembers Koga-san of some of the early findings, “costing us over 10 Million USD annually – since emergency shipping always costs more than regular shipping. Celonis revealed that in over 30% of cases, orders were placed as emergency shipments, but the technical engineer in charge of maintenance only arrived on-site four days after delivery. Thanks to this insight, we were able to cut about 15% of our emergency shipment costs.”

https://delivery-p141552-e1488202.adobeaemcloud.com/adobe/assets/urn:aaid:aem:385c8cae-cebd-4031-be3b-e4c3b582ecb8/original/as/65628246da67c9286d33ec.gif https://videos.celonis.com/watch/h15LFcLQstdQYxUAJrLRab?disable_popouts=1&v=4.2.30&type=inline&unique-player-id=womdb

Process optimization goes global

After early success in Japan, Jonathan Wannicke, Head of Digital Process Transformation CoE was keen to show what Celonis could do beyond visibility. Focusing on the Finance function in Europe, Wannicke started to realize, within just a few months, bottom line value in both Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable. Soon Celonis solutions like the Collections App, Duplicate Invoice Checker, Open Credit Memos App, and Payment Terms Checker replaced Fujitsu’s legacy apps. Later Fujitsu expanded into IT Service Management and Order Management.

There was only one problem that slowed down adoption: not everyone liked seeing their processes and all their complexity. “Celonis can be brutally honest,” says Wannicke. “We have stakeholders that have been with Fujitsu for over 30 years, building our processes from the ground up. So, we had some very emotional discussions and had to get people to trust the data.”

Award-winning combination of PI and AI

But the data rarely lies, and lying in that data is the information Fujitsu needed to take back control of safety stock. At first the task looked simple on paper: bring safety stock down to an ideal level after intentionally expanding it during the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, reducing stock levels was complicated. Fujitsu’s System Platform Business Group has an enormous amount of products and materials, amounting to more than 25,000 types and 2.5 million items. Getting transparency into this enormous catalogue required the team to combine data from 11 systems spanning the entire supply chain, real-time insights into inventories across Japan, and historic data on end-customer buying behavior.

“With Celonis we were able to integrate the data dispersed across 11 systems in just one month,” explains Kazutomi Taneda, Head of PRS Hardware Support Business Dept.

Product Related Services Div. Managed Infrastructure Services Business Unit, Fujitsu. “We can now centralize information such as lead times, procurement load size, and historical average consumption.” Buyers now have a single source of truth about stock levels across Fujitsu’s factories as well as AI-backed information about market developments and customer demand.

The results:

• 20% reduction of safety stock
• 50% fewer inventory orders within 6 months of implementation
• Huge productivity gains
• Internal award for AI innovation

“Beyond numerical targets, the on-site teams have become more aware of process issues and started pro-actively addressing them,” explains Taneda-san.

From visibility to AI-enhanced automation

Some 15 experts are now taking process mining, process modeling, and AI global at Fujitsu. Gone are the days when Celonis was only used for transparency. Now Celonis is seen and used as a platform for large-scale business transformation and will soon cover ten processes, spanning from Finance to IT Service Management to Master Data Management to the entire Supply Chain with Inventory Management being that latest addition. “We use machine learning and action flows for automation,” explains Wannicke. “And we are also using Celonis AI capabilities like the Annotation Builder and AI Agents.”

Wannicke’s advice for getting the most out of Process Intelligence (PI) and AI?

1. Identify the right areas to apply AI
2. Provide Fujitsu’s unique business context (rules, benchmarks, KPIs, etc.) to AI
3. Make sure AI is not only delivering ROI, but is also used in a sustainable way that keeps its environmental impact in mind

A culture of data-driven change

The growing awareness towards the power of data shows how far Fujitsu has come on its transformation journey. “In the beginning, we had to go to the business functions and make our case for Celonis,” says Wannicke. “Now there’s a huge pull from the business side to get involved.”

No longer satisfied with just optimizing its own processes, Fujitsu became a trusted Celonis partner in 2024. “As part of our growing IT service business, we can help our customers connect to Celonis,”explains Wannicke. “We bring a lot of experience to the table, especially in regions like Japan where our own GLOVIA systems are widely used.“

https://delivery-p141552-e1488202.adobeaemcloud.com/adobe/assets/urn:aaid:aem:88eb0109-4fe2-4b58-9c46-630abe2b92ab/original/as/6dbd250121ab94038fbb53.gif https://videos.celonis.com/watch/vqjVR9zxA9n8ZDVgZojXJR

With such a big demand for Process Intelligence and AI, what’s next on the agenda? “Our next step is to combine multiple processes in Celonis using AI,” says Koga-san. “If we think about multiple processes combined with our AI, we can support our customers to completely transform the efficiency of their business.”