“This is vital for us because a wholesale company ultimately has only its processes as an optimization tool for competitiveness."
Thanks to Celonis, services like same-day delivery won't be much of a challenge for Schukat in the future.
Fast delivery times are not just a promise for customers — they are a decisive competitive advantage. Georg Schukat, owner and CEO of Schukat Electronic in Monheim, is a distributor of electronic components with over 25,000 products in his portfolio.
Schukat provides 24-hour delivery service, but the company has gone even further by promoting same-day-delivery. This business goal requires continuous digitization and highly efficient, transparent processes.
SAP has been a part of Schukat since 2009, and SAP S/4HANA promised more speed and analysis possibilities. The project has been successful, but the company's process flows and their weaknesses were still not transparent. Leadership was looking for the possibility to visualize and evaluate processes in real-time.
“As a wholesaler, we differentiate ourselves over our processes,” explained Georg Schukat.
Enter Celonis Process Mining, a technology designed to find and fix process inefficiencies. The pilot project proved as early as 2014 that everything was right there: the speed, the transparency, and the real-time insights into process bottlenecks. The transparency achieved left the project team astonished, and the foundation for these insights was the analysis of the log files in the company's SAP system.
Traditionally, the first starting point for optimization is the warehouse. At Schukat, 97 percent of goods are delivered directly from the warehouse, and the company was facing delivery delay issues. But before the processes in the warehouse were considered, Reichmann, who is responsible for the continuous optimization of processed, zeroed in on purchasing.
The goal was to massively reduce the need for time buffers, and Schukat was successful. These buffers have been replaced by an explicit dunning system to the supplier in the ERP system. A vendor evaluation system examines the reliability of the delivery and the average deadline data that helps buyers and dispatchers look beyond the scheduled delivery time.
Schukat also drove productivity through the analysis of data from their SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) system. With these logs, Celonis technology streamlined the delivery process.
Process mining insights found that delays were also arising on the sales side of the business. Supply locks, a lack of automation in order processing, and credit management issues were slowing down productivity.
But today, by leveraging Celonis, Schukat has an overview of the entire order process. Customer service knows when the goods actually reach the customers, and teams have real-time insights to identify, locate, and eliminate execution gaps.
“We had a guess where we could be weak. With Celonis, we have seen where we have built ourselves unnecessary problems in the processes," said Reichmann. “This is vital for us because a wholesale company ultimately has only its processes as an optimization tool for competitiveness. Celonis helps us to make this process optimization really effective.”
