J & J at Celosphere

"We were able to see exactly when the new processes went into production and when the team was driving adoption."

Johnson & Johnson’s Brooks Olphin shares how they’ve mastered rapid, ongoing, and team-centric value creation with process mining and Celonis.

Like any other transformational technology, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype around process mining and want to jump right in at the deep end.

But even when you’re equipped with intuitive tools like Celonis that make getting started with process mining simple, dropping new tools directly into your global teams isn’t always the fastest or most consistent path to success.

Brooks Olphin, Product Line Owner for Process and Task Mining at Johnson & Johnson, walked us through their process mining adoption, development and growth journey. Brooks showcased the power of a well-equipped and well-structured global Process Center of Excellence — and demonstrated how centralizing your process optimization efforts can be the fastest route to global value.

Here’s a quick recap of the story he shared.

The Johnson & Johnson journey to process mining

Johnson & Johnson’s journey to process mining started in a very similar way to many other Celonis customers. The company wanted to digitize continuous process improvement and bring its process mapping and process discovery efforts into the 21st century.

After identifying Celonis as the perfect partner to help it do so, they embarked on a proof-of-value exercise. The team used Celonis to look at data from a single system, uncover the inefficiencies and opportunities hidden in the process, and understand the value of process mining first-hand.

But, crucially, this exercise quickly became a source of ongoing value in itself. “That first analysis was a key learning for us, helping us understand how we can further roll analysis out globally,” said Brooks. “Ultimately, that initial exercise led to us creating global templates.”

Growing quickly and confidently with global templates

“For us, a global template is where we build a single data model that can be leveraged across multiple source systems, so that analysis can be used by different teams across multiple different regions, teams, and sectors,” continued Brooks.

The global templates enabled by Celonis have provided a strong foundation for Johnson & Johnson’s Process Center of Excellence. “The goal of our global COE is to use best practices to deliver things our teams will find practically useful day-to-day,” said Brooks. “We listen to user requirements, build an analysis to meet them, then deploy that as a global template so that others can pick it up and repeat that success easily.”

Having access to pre-built global templates aligned with the company’s current strategic priorities helps Johnson & Johnson’s teams avoid decision and analysis paralysis, learn what’s possible with process mining immediately, and see value from it quickly. Instead of having to find their way with the technology, teams have a clear starting point that they can grow from — branching out into custom analysis and utilizing a wider range of capabilities.

“We follow a crawl, walk, run, methodology,” said Brooks. “We try to get our users into the system and into their data as quickly as possible, knowing that we're going to continue to refine those user stories and the analysis that we create over time.”

Enabling team-driven analysis

When it comes to finding the most valuable processes, data sources, and areas of the business to analyze and explore, close collaboration with teams is essential.

“We start every new analysis journey with our internal customers,” said Brooks. “Oftentimes, we talk to them about what metrics matter most to them — which is typically linked to their strategic business objectives, such as on-time delivery or ease and effectiveness of communication.”

But in a lot of cases, the things they want to achieve — whether it’s cutting delivery cycle times, or eliminating supply chain bottlenecks — are too high-level for a single team to achieve alone. Fortunately, Johnson & Johnson’s team and their template-based approach to process mining have also helped the company find creative solutions to that challenge.

“By moving to this team-based methodology, we're able to create metrics that can be leveraged upstream and downstream from the team that created them, while remaining tied to that team’s objectives,” Brooks explained.

“For example, if we think about on-time delivery, we might start by talking to fulfilment. But we know there are also opportunities to improve that metric through inventory optimization, or by improving first-time right rates. In that case, our Process Center of Excellence would work across order entry, order fulfillment, and master data, to ensure that we're aligning to that strategic objective, but we're also giving that team objectives and areas of improvement that they can then own and drive throughout their process.”