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3 key reasons customers choose Celonis to solve Supply Chain challenges
If there’s one domain where Process Intelligence works particularly well, it’s Supply Chain. With supply chain disruptions now the norm, leaders have to focus on what they can control - their processes.
A common question I get from businesses considering Process Intelligence is, “Why Celonis?” And by that they mean, ‘What makes Celonis the best choice to solve today’s biggest supply chain challenges?’
Let’s start with the basics.
What is Celonis? What is Process Intelligence?
Celonis uses Process Mining technology as the basis of our offering, the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform. It sits on top of the transactional systems and solutions used across an organization and analyzes process data to create transparency and visibility into how business processes run, helping improve business performance.
Still a little confused about Process Intelligence? Learn more with our short video series In the Process, or our latest Process Intelligence eBook: Meet Process Intelligence.
Process Intelligence helps hundreds of customers determine whether their processes and material flows are running efficiently, regardless of whether they are experiencing supply chain disruptions or not. By safely collecting the data from all of the systems you use to run your business — like ERP, CRM, TMS, and even homegrown systems — Celonis:
Provides a living, breathing moving picture of how your processes run and how the underlying parts and materials flow through the supply chain in response to these processes;
Proactively surfaces opportunities for improvement; and
Intelligently orchestrates actions to improve cross-functional processes.
So what frequently drives customers to choose Celonis to help address their challenges? We’ve heard a few recurring themes.
Reason 1: Celonis visualizes real-time supply chain processes, allowing companies to react more quickly and accurately.
On a daily basis,supply chain operations must deal with many decisions to address short-term supply chain imbalances. Celonis provides both a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening and granular insight at the SKU and transaction level into what actions need to be taken to meet a specific business objective, today. This helps customers respond faster when disruptions occur, or if plans don’t unfold as expected.
Take German sealing specialist Freudenberg, which uses Celonis to manage shortages in real time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Freudenberg (like many companies) faced frequent and severe supply chain disruptions that resulted in material shortages.
More timely, complete insights were needed to get ahead of shortages and react when unexpected shortages occurred. It was crucial for the team to understand exactly which supplier could not deliver, what inventory levels were at what plant, and when to prioritize specific materials at risk of shortages. But before Celonis, pulling the right data to look into these issues was complex and took them several days to complete.
With Celonis, Freudenberg can not only actually see material shortages and their impact on downstream processes like production, but also understand indirect dependencies on procurement and sales.
“Celonis makes our bottleneck situation more transparent than ever and helps us make faster decisions and find better solutions.” - Kai Führer, Director Supply Chain Measurements & Assessments, Freudenberg FST
In another example, GE Healthcare wanted to improve on-time delivery. To do this, GE needed an end-to-end view of the entire value chain to better coordinate shipments and communicate delivery dates to customers.
However, GE’s complex supply chain made gaining this level of visibility a challenge. At GE, once an order comes in, it’s touched by many teams using all kinds of tools that don’t talk to each other — so, pre-Celonis, figuring out problems such as why shipments were delayed was a very manual exercise.
GE implemented Celonis within one business segment for one region, and within 6 weeks, they got line-by-line visibility into full orders. Celonis immediately helped them proactively identify leading indicators of delayed orders, like changes to delivery dates. As a result, they cut down their fulfillment cycle time by 18 days, helping improve on-time delivery and speeding up cash flow by 2 weeks.
There is no value creation without visibility. Celonis is the leader in visualizing process data through Process Mining, which is one of the reasons customers turn to us to address these types of challenges. Nevertheless, this is only one among many other reasons we consistently hear from industry-leading customers like Neste, Rational and Conrad Electric.
Reason 2: Celonis is much easier to customize and faster to deploy than competitors.
Customers consistently cite Celonis’ pre-built connectors to common systems (ERPs, CRMs etc.), low-code infrastructure, and templatized solutions to common supply chain challenges (such as operational solutions created for material planners to update safety stock levels) as reasons for choosing us.
For example, in 2022, an automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) was considering a big data solution against Celonis. At the time, the OEM was dealing with a high volume of shortages (who wasn’t?). Facing a limited inventory of parts, they specifically wanted to shuffle their inventory to prioritize manufacturing vehicles that offered better margins.
The competing big data vendor was able to show where materials were. But what made the OEM ultimately choose Celonis instead was our pre-built solution: An initial iteration of the Material Allocation App, which showcases the impact of disruptions on the bill of materials. The Celonis team was able to easily customize the App to meet the OEM’s needs, and the first iteration of the OEM’s business-specific solution was created within three months — drastically faster than what other vendors were able to offer.
Read more about the Celonis Material Allocation App
French mobility and rail manufacturer Alstom echoed this sentiment when they were looking into software to help them reduce excess. They considered using their existing BI solutions to identify where inventory should be moved (for example, inventory may have been in excess in one location, but another location may have needed it). But using Alstom’s existing BI solution, it would have taken a year or more to see what Celonis was able to show Alstom in three months.
This is where Celonis’ experience in Process Mining shines. We’ve been in the game longer than any other Process Mining solution and we’ve applied that experience to make Process Intelligence as “out of the box” as possible, which accelerates time to value for our customers.
Reason 3: Celonis complements the existing tech stack, improving the performance of what’s already there, rather than ripping and replacing existing supply chain technologies.
Celonis sits on top of transactional systems to show how your processes are running and orchestrate process improvements. These updates are then synced back into the rest of the tech stack, cascading into your planning software and other supply chain tech solutions and improving the output they provide.
Stada’s success with Celonis is a great example of this benefit in action. The German-based pharma company grappled with regular stockouts due to material shortages, often leading to production stops and lost sales. We all know that there’s little anyone can do when there’s a global shortage of critical material — but what can be controlled is how much inventory you plan to order based on expected demand.
Like many organizations, Stada was doing what had worked best for them, which was exporting relevant data from all of their ERP instances to determine what their safety stock levels should be. However, this method was prone to errors and did not provide the required data quickly enough. Enter Celonis.
Stada now uses Celonis to keep their planning parameters up to date based on actual consumption and replenishment trends. By extracting transactional data from the ERP to identify the actual lead time it takes to get goods from suppliers (procurement, production process data) and get goods to customers (production and order management data), Celonis ensures accurate lead times are incorporated into planning parameters. Their material planners now review the safety stock levels on a regular basis, helping Stada realize recurring P/L benefits, and reduce stockouts and lost sales.
In short: Celonis lets Stada get the information they need from legacy systems more quickly and easily, without disrupting or discarding those systems, ultimately helping Stada’s teams improve performance and flexibility.
While there will undoubtedly be overlap between various process-focused and data-focused technologies as they grow and advance, in the end, customers choose Celonis because they want to improve how their supply chain processes operate and how those processes respond to disruptions.
By focusing on improving the processes that make their supply chain run, customers use Celonis to bridge the gap between planning and execution, creating a more agile and resilient supply chain.
Key takeaways
Celonis can help enterprises visualize supply chain processes, giving real-time, actionable insights.
Celonis is easier to customize and often easier to deploy than competitors.
Celonis integrates with existing tech stacks and software landscapes without disrupting anything, making systems and programs that are already there (like older or more complex ERPs) easier to work with.
Read more about why enterprises choose Celonis:
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