EDEKA + Celonis

As one of the largest regional companies in the German EDEKA Group, EDEKA Minden-Hannover keeps a close eye on its process performance. 

That goes especially for their IT area, given that their service desk receives a daily flood of tickets, ranging from hardware failures to problems with the ERP system. The service team knew that for these tickets to be handled in the most efficient way, they needed to understand and analyze the ticketing process in real time. 

Celonis, the market leader in process mining and Process Intelligence, was their solution to do just that. With the Celonis platform, the IT service team can now quickly resolve incidents and correct critical deviations before they become problematic.

But let’s take a step back first and have a closer look at the problem.

EDEKA needed a simple overview of their massive ticket amounts

With around 1,500 stores, seven production facilities, nearly 76,000 employees, and a turnover of more than 11 billion euros, EDEKA Minden-Hannover is the most profitable regional company in the German EDEKA corporate group.

To maintain this growth trajectory, streamlined processes — particularly in IT support — are their focus. After all, IT support can’t keep independent retailers waiting for weeks for their problems, for example with the POS system, to be solved.

Given the ever-growing volumes of data, however, this challenge is immense. Every month, around 15,000 tickets get generated group-wide, with retailers, major customers, and logistics staff reporting software and hardware problems.

Identifying the relationships between individual and systematic errors and uncovering optimization potential was both difficult and time-consuming. The IT Service Desk team simply lacked a current and easy-to-access overview of their tickets. 

Celonis helps EDEKA with process visualization and standardization

EDEKA Minden-Hannover was therefore looking for an easy-to-handle software solution. The goal was to be able to visualize processes and generate reports quickly and easily from the growing amount of data. The solution had to meet the following requirements:

• Quick identification of so-called “main sources of error” and critical deviations from to-be processes, in order to be able to rectify these promptly

• Ability to forecast the number of tickets in a given period of time, to improve workforce planning

• Support for process standardization

Last but not least, the individual EDEKA stores should also benefit by getting faster solutions for their problems. 

And Celonis delivered in every dimension. 

Individual scalability scores big

“Our biggest plus is the time saved in the analysis,” says Michael Dannenberg, department head of IT process coordination/user service at EDEKA Minden-Hannover. “With Celonis, the explorative analysis of root causes has become a lot simpler and is more convenient than before.”

“Celonis Process Mining is a real-time search engine for processes.”

The IT experts at EDEKA Minden-Hannover were particularly convinced of Celonis’ ease-of-use when it comes to scaling and adapting analysis to their needs: Celonis users are not tied to predefined KPIs, time periods, and evaluation areas. Instead, they can filter the process data as desired and, if necessary, drill down to the level of individual files when exploring process flows. 

Requirements for individual reports can now be implemented by any Celonis user using intuitive drill-down functions.

“Individual analyses can be created with just a few mouse clicks.”

As a result, the data analysts in IT Service Management don‘t have to wait for days or weeks for analysis results. “You can see exactly what is happening live in the system,” says Dannenberg.

Shorter ticket resolution times with Celonis

Celonis scored points not least due to its intuitive interface. A three-day training based on company data demonstrated the advantages of the Celonis platform to their data scientists, which in turn trained other employees on the solution. EDEKA Minden-Hannover moved at a similar pace when it comes to implementation. And the executive level is on board as well. “A member of our IT management board uses Celonis for targeted evaluations,” says Dannenberg.

The feedback from operational users is positive too. With Celonis, they can analyze their process areas faster and easier.

“The newfound analysis efficiency above all profits the EDEKA retailers,” says Dannenberg. “They no longer need to get frustrated about IT errors and can instead look forward to reduced solution times.”