Molex + Celonis

Molex uses Celonis to get visibility into its complex global supply chain processes, resulting in better warehouse efficiency and near-perfect confirmation and requisition approval rates.

Enabling a connected world

In a world where connections are everything, no one does them like Molex. As the makers of electronic, electrical, and fiber optic connectivity systems in every industry from medical and automotive to consumer electronics, Molex is literally at the heart of the connections that keep our world running.

Based in Illinois, Molex has a global footprint with factories in 65+ countries. Molex operates in multiple time zones with multiple languages, where it buys 70,000 parts per year from more than 5,000 direct suppliers. Many of their plants operate 24/7, creating 2,100 purchase order lines each day.

To say Molex has a complicated supply chain would be an understatement.

Low process visibility

Small changes or manual errors can quickly add up to bigger issues in a large supply chain. When it came to some of Molex’s purchase order processes, small changes and errors were making on-time customer delivery increasingly difficult.

Molex had the additional complication of low visibility into which processes needed the most attention, a critical piece of pinpointing and resolving process challenges.

The goal was clear: to identify bottlenecks, reduce supplier-related fatigue, and be more agile in handling interruptions and delays. Before addressing these operational issues, however, Molex needed to get its arms around its master data to see where changes were occurring.

This is where Celonis came in.

“We buy 70,000 parts, give or take through a year, and we have, give or take, a hundred thousand finished goods that we sell to our customers. Prior to Celonis, we struggled with understanding our confirmations, the confirmations on our purchase orders. Celonis gave us the insights at one click to understand the fact that we only had 30% of our orders confirmed. With the insights and with focus, we've moved to 90% of our purchase orders confirmed. Celonis plays a role in that to make sure that we can deliver on time to our customers.” says Molex’s Sr. Director of Supply Chain, Tony Gainsford.

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Untangling delays in the Procure to Pay process

Molex immediately saw an opportunity to use Celonis in the Procure-to-Pay process.

“Celonis allowed us to get a lens on those 2,100 requisitions and to figure out firstly, did that buyer actually have to create the requisition or did they trust the system to create the requisition? Then, was it accurate or did they need to make a whole lot of changes?” says Molex’s Sr. Director of Supply Chain, Tony Gainsford.

Molex discovered that people in their largest factory (among some others) were manually approving requisitions down to just a single dollar. It was time consuming and, ultimately, deemed unnecessary.

“We had buyers spending eight or nine hours a week creating confirmations. And then you start looking across the organization using Celonis and you can see, well with one click, look at all these transactions,” says Gainsford.

With this insight, Molex was able to make a change in their ERP that let small requisitions flow through automatically. This single modification sped up the confirmation process, eliminated waste, and freed people to do higher value work – like approving large requisitions and reviewing exceptions.

“You're saving eight hours here in a week and eight hours here and eight hours here and eight hours here. It scales,” Gainsford says.

Gainsford is now applying the lessons he’s learned – and new insights from Celonis – to know where to streamline Molex’s invoicing process as well.

“Imagine you can put an MRI machine on top of your ERP and you've got all the insights that you want. Celonis allows you to scan the whole process end-to-end with one click. You can't do that with any other application,” says Gainsford. Today, some 87% of Molex’s invoices are touchless.

Celonis provides insights that drive Molex’s larger P2P transformation

Celonis provided Molex the insights necessary to make incremental changes that added up to a much larger P2P transformation.

When Molex implemented the B2B collaboration platform SAP Business Network across the company, Molex teams were able to use Celonis as a layer over it to monitor key KPIs from day one (and on an ongoing, daily basis). This intelligence layer gives teams real-time insights that let them quickly pivot when necessary.

With Celonis providing such deep insights into both processes and master data, Molex teams had exactly what they needed to drive outcomes in other areas as well.

Not settling for visibility into manually created purchase requisitions, Molex also uses Celonis to understand when requisitions are changed by the buyer and how often, which PO confirmations are owned by the supplier, and which invoices should auto-post.

“We have not been able to do that with previous complex technology implementations. This is where Celonis is an absolute game-changer,” says Gainsford.

Warehouse management success

With momentum from the P2P use case, Molex carried its successes to Order to Cash, particularly within Warehouse Management.

By using Celonis to create a living digital twin of Molex’s warehouse operations, Director of Process Excellence, MJ Patil, got critical visibility into when items were arriving and shipping out. But the real game-changer was having the ability to simulate changes before implementing them in a particular warehouse.

“We really wanted to get a good understanding of this complete value stream that happens in a warehouse,” says Patil. “We have operationalized it. The warehouse managers really use this capability on a day-to-day basis… And we're seeing value.”

By working within different purchasing areas – buyers, sourcing engineers, category managers – Patil can understand who owns decision-making down to the plant level. With this layer of intelligence hooked up to Molex’s ERP, Patil has the data to confidently drive new initiatives. Next step: using that data to change user behavior.

With the insights from Celonis, Patil educates buyers and warehouse teams about the frequency of the changes being made, who should actually be making them, and the downstream effects each change has on other parts of the business.

Armed with real-time insights from Celonis, Molex’s buyers now make more informed buying decisions and are able to avoid costly, unnecessary changes. The result? Molex has already seen a 10-15% efficiency improvement in a single warehouse.

Patil is now looking to expand Celonis elsewhere: “We want to replicate the success we have had in this one warehouse across other big warehouses. It's the sheer power of surfacing these insights at a day-to-day transaction level that helps us to fine tune.”

Bringing data and people together

Gainsford and Patil take extra pride in the ways Celonis is transforming work at Molex.

Gainsford says, “Having insights that are easy to see, easy for end users to interact with, easy for them to understand – we can reimagine the future and use that data to drive a different outcome.”

Part of that reimagined future is finally having the ability to see things teams couldn’t before. “We are trying to enable them, empower them with this capability… to make sure that they leverage it on a day-to-day basis,” says Patil.

With Celonis, teams can showcase to buyers the exact impact a single incorrect or unchanged field can have. Molex has even turned these insights into an execution app where buyers can enter inputs to see everything from delays to price changes, all in real-time.

Today, Molex buyers make decisions faster. Self-service is more efficient. And the company is scaling improvements globally.

“Before, these processes happened in silos, led by different organizations, different teams within the company,” says Patil. “But now, I have the capability to look at an order intake and see what really happened throughout its lifecycle. I am very excited to take this to the next level within Molex.”