How Process Intelligence is accelerating Hitachi Energy’s journey towards company-wide data-driven decision making

At Hitachi Energy, we’ve seen a massive productivity boost by using Process Intelligence in our Shared Services. The goal now is to scale data-driven process optimization across the entire company.

The market for renewable energy is growing rapidly and as the market leader, we at Hitachi Energy are paving the way towards a more sustainable future. Our solutions and innovations cover grid automation and integration, transformers as a product, and high voltage. 

As CIO, I need to future-proof our enterprise architecture across all of these areas while ensuring our business units can fulfill the growing volume of orders without interruption. My priorities: 

• Do everything with safety, integrity and quality – that’s our ‘license to operate’, our guiding principle for every employee

• Leverage the platforms we‘ve implemented during our IT transformation 

• Drive digitalization and getting the business AI-ready

To achieve all this, it‘s essential to have the right data at the right time. And to get people to trust that data. 

Celonis Process Intelligence has made a huge difference for us in both areas – it enables us to create unprecedented transparency and share relevant information across teams and functions. Our Shared Services are already achieving great results with Celonis across oursupply chain. To give you an example, in thePurchase-to-Pay process , our teams can better collaborate with suppliers at the click of a button, saving thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of Dollars annually. 

My vision: use Celonis to get the entirety of Hitachi Energy AI-ready, become a truly data-driven organization, and drive innovation.

Setting the business up for continuous improvement 

At Hitachi Energy, I got the once-in-a-lifetime chance to build an IT infrastructure for 40,000 employees from the ground up.  Before our carve-out from Hitachi ABB, the business used to run on more than 30 ERP systems. We made the decision to replace this complex landscape with a cloud-first platform approach. In 2020, we started migrating to SAP S/4 HANA and we will be done very soon. Going forward, we want to focus on driving continuous improvement. This is where Celonis will play a key role as it allows us to pinpoint and prioritize improvement opportunities. 

Enabling data-based decision-making based on business data that matters 

In my space, you often hear that “data is the new oil.” Frankly, I disagree. Data has always been our oil. The challenge for IT is to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant data. It’s said that only about 15 percent of the data in a company is useful. It’s like a pig hunting for truffles. But with Celonis Process Mining (the technology at the heart of their platform), we can find these ‘data truffles’. How?

Process mining works like an X-ray of our company and our transactions. It creates a digital twin of our processes and allows us to examine our data at a very granular level. This gives us clear, data-driven insights into how our processes actually run and where we can improve. So we can optimize based on facts, instead of assumptions. 

Next generation process improvement powered by AI 

In my opinion, CIOs should act as role models of how to run a data-driven organization, and that includes building trust in data. The main reason why 86% of all large language models never make it into production? Companies don’t trust their own data. The implications are huge. That’s why it is mission-critical that everyone at Hitachi Energy becomes confident in making data-based decisions. 

We’re coming from the world of Excel where data had to be tracked down from all over the place and manually entered into data sheets. So, when it came to decision making, there was a high risk of working with outdated or incomplete data sets. But today, we have all the key platforms in place and the right tools to extract information out of them. So we need to enable people to use these tools and build trust in the data. 

Celonis is key here, as it allows us to connect and share information across different departments, people, and systems.  

With Celonis, we are now able to:

• Consolidate and analyze the data from different systems, platforms, and departments in one place and get updates in near real-time

• Establish a single source of truth on untapped value opportunities in our processes, so we know where and how to optimize

• Share our insights with the relevant stakeholders in a way that allows them to make smarter, fact-based decisions.

I want to take the entire organization to that stage of decision-making and process reliability – and then I want to take us to the next level of process improvement in combination with AI.

AI-powered solutions like the Celonis Process Intelligence platform already help us work faster, better, and more cheaply. Still, we’ve only scratched the surface so far. As we use more and more capabilities, I believe the combination of AI and process insights from Celonis will enable entirely new processes and integration across the board. We will drive process improvement on a scale we haven’t seen before. And I think this is where we need to go on our journey with Celonis.

Michael Loechle

CIO of Hitachi Energy

Michael Loechle is the CIO of Hitachi Energy. He and his team are responsible for building the company’s IT infrastructure after the carve-out from ABB Hitachi in 2019 and turn Hitachi Energy into a data-driven, AI-ready company. Loechle considers technologies like process mining as key components to drive that journey and enable company-wide continuous improvement.