HP + Celonis

"Using Celonis, HP found up to a billion dollars worth of cashflow opportunity in AP alone."

HP's Journey to Data-driven Business Execution with Celonis

Any organization can have a powerful vision and strong idea of how they want to innovate and change the world. But it’s their ability to execute on that vision and bring it to life that ultimately separates them from their competition.

When a business is making its vision a reality across its operations, it’s an incredible achievement to behold. That’s why we invited a whole host of our customers to speak at Celonis World Tour 2021, giving them a chance to share how they’ve mastered data-driven business execution, and show off the incredible impact it’s had on their business.

Joining us live for the event, Christine Hawkins, Director of Digital and Process Transformation at HP, walked us through her organization’s Celonis journey so far. She shared some amazing results, and useful tips for other leaders looking to transform their processes and unlock valuable process insights trapped in legacy systems and platforms.

Here’s a quick recap of Christine and HP’s story.

It all began with a monumental order backlog

Like many of our customers, HP’s journey with Celonis began when the team recognized a need for a clear and detailed view of its processes. But that need didn’t become apparent during a comfortable planning session, or a routine review of its systems. It presented itself in the form of a major operational crisis.

“Over the last couple of years HP has been implementing a new SAP system,” Christine explained. “In some of our markets, it was just a replacement of an old SAP order management system. But in others, we had to completely replace an old legacy tool. Everything was going well until we had to turn that legacy system off.”

“That told us that we weren’t really clear on exactly how our processes worked, particularly in our legacy systems. It led us to explore new and innovative techniques out there that can help us with that. And that's how we found Celonis Process Intelligence. ”

Breaking down some unique IT barriers

With a clear — and very present — need for greater process visibility identified, and Celonis selected as the ideal partner to provide it, HP got to work on implementation. But it wasn’t long before some unique barriers started to hold up progress.

“The HP IT team have some very unique requirements for connecting up a tool to our systems,” explained Christine. “So there were quite a lot of hurdles to get through before we could get Celonis connected. At times, my own team questioned whether fighting to meet those requirements was even worth it. But Celonis never gave up.”

“They’ve seen every type of requirement coming out of companies, so there was no challenge they couldn’t meet,” she continued. “They helped us go through all the hurdles and find a solution that would work within the HP IT environment. It was wonderful to have a partner experienced enough to push us through that challenging part of the journey.”

HP saw big value — fast

Today, Celonis is fully deployed at HP. And in just a few short months the team has already seen significant tangible and intangible benefits. “So, we’ve recently been taking steps to help our traditional process improvement community in HP to be more agile and nimble, and Celonis has really helped us with that,” said Christine.

“We’re trying to create a continuous stream of new use cases, rolling them all out in an agile way, helping teams realize their benefits quickly, then improve the value delivered over time,” she continued. “By getting Accounts Payable live first, we’ve been able to demonstrate the immense value that Celonis can deliver, and get a lot more teams interested in applying it across their lines of business.”

And when you look at the results already seen in Accounts Payable, it’s easy to see why so many other teams want in. Using Celonis, Christine’s team found up to a billion dollars worth of cashflow opportunity in AP alone.

Christine’s advice to new Celonis customers

To wrap her session up, Christine shared some valuable wisdom for other process transformation leaders that are thinking about, or just starting their journey with Celonis.

“Firstly, as with any innovative new tool, when you try to implement something like the Celonis Platform, you’re always going to encounter some level of skepticism or resistance,” she said. “What we found very valuable was having an executive sponsor who was willing to help us push Celonis through. We also worked closely with the Celonis team, who frankly have already handled every possible objection in the book. Together, they were able to calm every concern, and keep the implementation moving.”

Christine’s second piece of advice went back to the results HP saw in Accounts Payable, and the power of demonstrating value quickly. “After we onboarded our AP data into Celonis, we went to our executives and said, this is our data, and this is what we found,” Christine explained. “We showed them two huge findings in a five-minute demonstration, and engagement went through the roof.”

“Nothing grew our buy-in quite like seeing our own data in Celonis, showing everyone what our teams really do, and what HP invoicing processes really look like. I can’t recommend it enough.”