Stora Enso + Celonis

Stora Enso’s order fulfilment processes, which relied heavily on manual work, were a threat to on-time delivery and customer experience. But with the help of Celonis and a dedicated team of Citizen Developers, this world leader in renewable forestry products drove a game-changing digital transformation. Axing manual processes in favor of automation, Stora Enso built entirely new processes front to back, improving on-time in-full deliveries by 20%*.

Context: The seed of a great idea

When your business has been growing since the 1300s, confronting challenges in changing business environments becomes part of the DNA. So when Stora Enso realized they needed to redesign their approach to order fulfillment or fall below today’s customer expectations, it was simply another step in an evolutionary process 700 years in the making.

Or was it? Even for a major player in the global bioeconomy and a business so accustomed to evolving through innovation, supply chain transformation was a significant undertaking for Stora Enso. With billions in sales revenue on the line and no standard path to follow, this was a high-stakes move in uncharted territory.

But they had the seed of a great idea, seeing fertile ground building a partnership with experts in the fields of process optimization and automation. They turned to Celonis.

Challenge: The roots of the problem

Whether it’s food, fashion, or – in Stora Enso’s case – renewable packaging, biomaterials, and wooden construction materials, customers want their orders on time, in full, every time. To make this commercial necessity a reality, and to improve the overall efficiency of their order fulfilment processes, there were several process challenges Stora Enso had to overcome.

The first of these challenges was the overwhelming reliance on manual processes, including:

• Manual Data Search: The operations teams had to manually search across the tech stack for data relating to the detection and tracking of order delays.
• Manual Communication Workflow Management: With no defined or prioritized workflow, the customer communication exchange and notification of order changes or delivery delays took the form of manual emails.
• Manual Analytics: Generating data analysis and order performance reporting required manual data extraction from the operational system.

Without a unified system for delivery scheduling, tracking, or communication, Stora Enso's processes required significant manual effort from its ops teams and left many opportunities for improving the customer experience.

The next thorny issue to overcome was that many of Stora Enso’s core operational systems were bespoke builds for their needs. As a result, the process transformation couldn’t make use of most of the pre-built automations, applications or connectors available in the marketplace. The new workflow process, as well as data exchange and communication between the back office and front office built in Celonis, had to be developed practically from scratch.

Solution: The growth of an impactful team

The main focus for Stora Enso was to automate the process of updating delivery schedules for orders, tracking and addressing any delays or deviations efficiently. This meant getting their teams up to speed on the Celonis platform – fast. The company formed a team of in-house Citizen Developers to act as a bridge between business stakeholders and the IT teams.

After intensive training under the leadership of Anna Niekurzak, Stora Enso’s Center of Excellence (CoE) Lead, these process pioneers were able to put the Celonis pilot project into gear. Niekurzak explains: “Each Citizen Developer understood the business needs and could translate them into IT requirements.”

Working within Celonis Studio, the platform’s low-code development environment, the in-house team used process mining to identify order fulfillment pinch points, which they addressed with a range of solutions and automations. Now, for example, Stora Enso’s teams receive proactive alerts about the risk of delivery delays. This allows them to trigger the next recommended, automated action – such as updating order status in source systems and informing the front-office team about required changes in the delivery date, with sufficient notice to mitigate the risk of late delivery.

The Celonis platform also provides an integration with Salesforce enabling Stora Enso to engage efficiently with customers over order status – in particular, notifying them promptly about any changes. In one seamless, automated flow:

1. The back-office Order Fulfillment Experts (OFE) team receives a delivery delay notification in Celonis
2. The OFE creates a case in Salesforce to trigger the front-office Customer Excellence Team (CET) to correspond with the customer
3. Customer response to the delivery date shift is fed back to the CET
4. The CET pass it back through Salesforce to the Celonis platform by updating the orders in the source system
5. New tasks are created for the OFE team to optimize delivery scheduling.

The results have been impressive. With a first platform go-live in January 2023, Stora Enso’s delivery performance has improved significantly, with an OTIF (on-time, in-full) rate up by 20%*. Customers now receive order updates within one working day, whereas previously the case handling time was several days. In addition they have over 50 active, operational Celonis end users who have managed over 1,000 tasks*.