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Capgemini and PepsiCo: Managing risk and invoice deductions
Global giants lift the lid on tangible benefits of partnership at Celosphere 2023.
The partnership between Celonis, Capgemini, and PepsiCo began back in 2020, focused solely on the finance function. Since then it has evolved into a collaboration spanning 40 use cases over multiple business units, geographies, and approaches – including the use of object-centric process mining and AI.
Capgemini and PepsiCo showcased two important innovations that have emerged from these use cases at Celosphere 2023.
Celonis for risk monitoring
When PepsiCo wanted to improve risk control, the team sought to make their data work doubly hard.
“I wanted to use technology to monitor risk using the same data I used for my process improvements”, explained Stefanie Nicholls, Process Governance Senior Manager in PepsiCo’s Global Process Excellence team.
However, in the initial search for risk optimization solutions, Nicholls and the team found processes around risk management to be inflexible, expensive, retrospective, and slow. Dealing with risk required reviewing extensive reports, hard testing, and determining if the correct controls had been applied historically. “My big question was, how can we take advantage of all the data we already have in Celonis?”
The solution: using the Celonis platform to develop PepsiCo’s Smart Monitoring Center with Capgemini. With intuitive dashboards, the Smart Monitoring Center provides actionable insight on risks across accounts receivable, order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and accounts payable. It allows Nicholls and her colleagues to:
Pinpoint risk locations / occurrences (geographically and by function).
Prioritize the urgency of the risks.
Monitor new risks and risk mitigation activities as they occur – automatically triggering alerts (using Celonis Action Flows) to process owners.
Receive real-time alarms of potentially high-risk activities (for instance, a customer’s credit terms being extended by 30%).
The Smart Monitoring Center has been developed by Capgemini to ensure PepsiCo has an intuitive, data-driven approach to risk management that’s built upon business KPIs. “My dream come true,” Nicholls neatly summed up.
Invoice deductions at PepsiCo
Robin den Boer, Director of Process Engineering at Capgemini Invent, walked the Celosphere audience through a similar story of data-driven process revitalization at PepsiCo. Rather than risk management, this time it was invoice deductions.
More than 100,000 claims per year required manual intervention rather than being automatically matched. Despite PepsiCo having a 40-strong global deductions team, this cost a lot of time. When claims weren’t resolved within agreed timeframes, deductions were written off. This cost a lot of money.
Den Boer explained that at PepsiCo the main reasons for deductions are promotions, baseline agreements, and pricing fluctuations. For each customer, these variations need to be captured and approved at the system level in order to be applied correctly. This responsibility doesn’t lie with the deductions team, but further upstream.
By using Celonis, Den Boer and his team discovered the sales team was not always inputting contract details into the system properly – nor ever approving them. This was causing valid deduction claims to require others to go into the system and make approvals manually.
Dashboards for deductions
Capgemini addressed this by providing dashboards to the sales teams, flagging the critical contract information in need of entry or approval. With more of the correct deduction information in the system, the number of interventions needing manual intervention plummeted.
To help the deductions team more directly, Capgemini also sought solutions downstream. Firstly by checking all contracts in the system were correct and up-to-date – minimizing unnecessary deductions. Secondly, Capgemini used Celonis to provide dashboards that enable the prioritization of high-value deductions. With this, PepsiCo could allocate deduction team resources based on generating the biggest business benefits.
“With this upstream and downstream approach, we managed to make the deduction process more efficient”, concluded Den Boer.
There were few more impressive examples of practical value creation showcased at Celosphere 2023 than in the partnership between Capgemini and PepsiCo. Their collaboration, powered by Celonis for Consulting, demonstrates the tangible benefits of using process mining technology to accelerate time-to-value of customer engagement.
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