Mondelēz International + Celonis

In less than 18 months, Mondelēz International unlocked massive gains across seven end-to-end processes — freeing up over ten million dollars in value, improving margins, and protecting revenue. Now, the snack giant is using Celonis for their next big challenge: becoming an autonomous enterprise.

Historically-high cocoa prices. Mounting scepticism toward “shrinkflation”. Consumers who want to snack more mindfully. Against this backdrop, a snacking giant like Mondelēz International can’t afford any cracks in their core processes.

The powerhouse behind household staples like Oreo, Cadbury, Milka, Toblerone, Ritz, and Philadelphia is serving billions of customers in over 150 countries.

But behind the scenes of managing an annual revenue of $39.3 billion and a global workforce of 91,000 employees lies an incredibly complex process landscape. In the race to protect their margins and become an autonomous enterprise, Mondelēz International made a strategic bet on the Celonis Platform.

In under 18 months, the CPG behemoth has scaled Celonis across seven end-to-end domains — improving margins, freeing up cash flow (ten million dollars and counting), and protecting bottom-line revenue.

With this proven track record, Mondelēz International have now turned Celonis into the operational backbone of their enterprise-wide AI transformation.

Serving up sweet process gains across Purchase-to-Pay

The company’s journey has been one of exceptional scale and pace. “We started with one use case at the end of 2024. Six months later, we made the decision to embrace Celonis as a strategic enterprise platform,” recalls Rossana Rizzotto, Head of the Office of the CIDO.

The argument was won by data. While departments considered themselves data-driven, true end-to-end visibility was limited. “When it comes to understanding how our processes are performing, we’ve been mostly shooting in the dark,” adds Miko Maciejewski, VP of MDS Procurement, Legal, CGA and Sustainability.

They started with one of the most powerful cash flow levers: fixing their payment terms. Celonis provided a real-time digital twin of their Source-to-Pay operations — a dynamic, system-agnostic visualization of how their processes actually run, enriched with Mondelēz International’s unique business knowledge (think business rules, KPI calculations, process maps, etc.).

With Celonis combining their data from previously disparate SAP systems, the team quickly identified a cash leakage: there was a gap between what buyers had negotiated and how they actually paid suppliers. Mondelēz International could now see inconsistencies between POs, invoices, and vendor master data in real-time and make sure the best terms were applied to every single transaction.

“We recovered millions with this use case alone”, says Alessandra Silvano. The VP of Procurement Strategy and Digital Sourcing, Global Supply Chain also states her function has gained massive traction with internal business partners.

Maciejewski’s team saw similar results tackling aging credit memos — a notorious black hole in a sprawling net of ERP systems. “We didn’t even know how much money we were losing because we simply had no visibility,” Maciejewski admits.

With Celonis connected to their top 20 systems of record, that rapidly changed. “At a click of a button, we now see a full dashboard of which suppliers owe us what amount, so my team can follow up.” Within a quarter of going live, his team recovered over six million dollars — “and this is just the beginning,” he adds.

How Mondelēz International bakes Celonis into their core

Massive wins like these weren’t left unnoticed by leadership. This opened an opportunity to transition Celonis to an enterprise-wide operating model. In under 18 months, the snack behemoth systematically broke down operational walls, spreading Celonis across seven global end-to-end processes: Source-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Record-to-Report, Hire-to-Retire, Master Data Management, Innovate-to-Market, and Go-to-Market.

There’s no point in sugarcoating: driving change at this scale requires a huge shift in corporate culture, one that’s not always straightforward. “There’s a certain learning curve that needs to happen,” says Maciejewski, who’s been leading the GBS transformation in Source-to-Pay to an outcome-based model. “People often don’t get what Celonis can do for them right away. But once they see the value and how intuitive the platform is, it’s like flipping a switch.”

To democratize the power of Celonis, Rizzotto and her team established a robust Hub-and-Spoke Center of Excellence (CoE). Rather than forcing individual business units into the same ‘mold’, this model allowed teams to drive and own their process improvements while maintaining centralized governance. “Our ambition is to see our 500 users co-innovate with us on the platform,” says Rizzotto.

To make that ambition a reality, the CoE regularly hosts learning events, sharing process wins and best practices globally. On the ground, dedicated CoE leads spearhead new use cases across the business teams — making sure the business stays hungry for more.

Mondelēz International’s AI transformation towards self-healing processes

Spreading Celonis across the business is just one part of the story. Mondelēz International recently also decided to make Celonis the backbone of their AI transformation, starting with injecting business logic into their third-party AI assistants, such as Amazon Quick via Celonis Agent Tools.

“Celonis gives us something we desperately need in our ambition to become an autonomous, AI-driven enterprise: context,” explains Rizzotto. “It combines process visibility with contextualized knowledge so AI can reason what and why something is happening.”

→ Read her blog on how Mondelēz International is building towards self-healing processes with Celonis.

Going forward, Mondelēz International are planning to use AI powered by Celonis in three ways:

1. Explore new AI use cases: starting with having AI ingest and analyze free text requisitions flowing through their procurement systems to keep spend under management and give buyers more leverage in supplier negotiations.

2. Orchestrating Agentic AI: The company plans to monitor their rapidly growing agentic workforce with Celonis, starting with Source-to-Pay. The vision: Feeding AI actions directly back into their digital twin, so agents learn from historical patterns, past decisions, and exceptions.

3. Democratizing Process Intelligence: The team is innovating with Celonis on linking their chatbots to Celonis so teams can deep-dive into process performance and next-best actions in an intuitive question-and-answer interface.

Creating the recipe for an autonomous future

Traditional CPG companies regularly grapple with complex tech stacks — a hurdle Celonis seamlessly cuts through by being completely system-agnostic. “What sets Celonis apart is how easily it connects with your systems, and the user experience is very intuitive,” says Rizzotto. “Building a digital twin and accessing your business knowledge happens almost naturally.”

In the foreseeable future, Mondelēz International have set their eyes on implementing the new Celonis Context Model — the heart of the platform that allows businesses to bring in Decision Intelligence alongside Process Intelligence, with features including scenario planning, simulation, and forecasting capabilities. The vision: building “self-healing, autonomous” processes that anticipate disruptions, adjust themselves, and solve problems before they occur.

As Maciejewski notes, this will allow teams to shift to overseeing agent performance inside Celonis, stepping in only to handle complex exceptions and focusing their time on truly strategic work. His advice to other companies looking to industrialize Enterprise AI with Celonis: