Malvern Panalytical + Celonis

Lab instrument manufacturer halved Days Sales Outstanding and freed up millions of pounds in working capital in Accounts Receivable using Celonis.

After making 17x ROI, they are now set to roll out Celonis across their entire Lead-to-Cash process.

Pick a material, any material. Chances are Malvern Panalytical can improve it. From adhesives to Bauxite, coffee to detergents, the company’s lab instruments and services combine cutting-edge engineering, data analytics, and AI to boost product quality and innovation.

Scientific instruments and services that make the invisible visible

Heading up process improvement at Malvern Panalytical is Mark Hoole-Jackson. In 2021, the Director of Business Excellence, Quality and Manufacturing Engineering remembers looking for an initial use case that would demonstrate Celonis’ capabilities to the business.

Early conversations revealed credit blocks to be causing issues in the Order-to-Cash process, but Hoole-Jackson soon realized the problems were more widespread — and in fact stemmed from Accounts Receivable at large.

Finding the process pain, treating it with Celonis

After plugging Celonis into the organization’s three separate data systems, Mark describes how they “built the bridges, and once we got the data aligned, we could see with clarity where the pinch points were in the process and then start to go after them.”

A lot of those pinch points were caused by teams not working in a standardized way. Mark says: “We found out very quickly it was taking them quite a long time, something like 12.4 minutes to write [different versions of the same] email to the customer.”

With Celonis, Malvern Panalytical made the team’s jobs easier: they identified where they could create standard emails they could send to customers with the touch of a button.

Collections dashboard simplified & accelerated overdues monitoring

The introduction of a collections dashboard similarly made the Accounts Receivable process a breeze. “We were able to semi-automate the process, so we were able to quickly identify which customers, by priority, had not paid for whatever reason… We gave the team a dashboard with red, amber, green statuses, which would tell them: these are the ones that you need to go after, in this order,” says Hoole-Jackson.

Before Celonis the team waited roughly 120 days before getting in touch with customers about a collection’s status, now they track progress on a day-by-day basis.

Helping the team work smarter, not harder built their confidence in Celonis, Hoole-Jackson says. “They loved it. If we said to them at the start of this, ‘There's this great new tool for you.’ [They’d respond] ‘Oh yeah. Really?’ If you said to them, six months later, ‘We're going to take that tool away,’ you'd probably have a riot.”

Days Sales Outstanding down, working capital freed up, CFO’s attention caught

Just months after starting with Celonis, Malvern Panalytical cut Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) by 50%; they pulled forward millions of pounds of cash (freeing up working capital); made 17x ROI (within a year); and Mark’s team is now using Celonis in Lead-to-Order to know whether they can hit their billion-pound revenue target in two years' time.

All that success caught the CFO’s eye: Mark describes, “He had millions of pounds of cash pulled forward, and he's cut his time in half, so what could be better for him with Malvern Panalytical?... He loved what we'd done, and he wants to take it and use it in the other operating companies within Spectris [Malvern Panalytical’s parent company.]”