FAQs: What can the Supply Chain Network Visibility App can do for your enterprise?

Many customers come to us wanting to use Process Intelligence in their supply chains, but most don't know where to start. That’s where the Supply Chain Network Visibility App comes in. 

What problem is the Supply Chain Network Visibility App solving?

One of the most common challenges customers look for Celonis to solve is lack of visibility into their supply chain. Many enterprises rely heavily on transactional systems or business intelligence (BI) reports to understand inventory health, but those technologies don't actually reveal what's going wrong, or why.

This is where the Celonis Supply Chain Network Visibility App can help. The App links the various pieces of your supply chain together, connecting material movements to supply chain performance in order to surface tactical and strategic value opportunities. With the App, you can get a bird’s eye view of your material flows by mapping the Bill of Materials, as well as transaction-level details of each SKU. 

This helps supply chain managers and material planners answer questions like:

• Are low service levels at one distribution center impacting service levels at the plant it supplies?

• How is supplier reliability or production adherence impacted by internal processes? 

• What are the most pressing opportunities right now to optimize inventory? 

Why did we replace the End-to-End Lead Times App and the Control Center App with the Supply Chain Network Visibility App?

Last year, we launched the End-to-End Lead Times app, which helped customers compress lead times by visualizing every flow of materials across their supply chain networks. 

The app was very successful, but there were a few things we noticed across customer implementations that led us to make some changes.

The customer need: Users wanted to do more than just compress lead times.

Compressing lead times is just one way to optimize working capital and boost service levels. Customers would often customize the app so they could use it to identify even more ways to protect service levels or prevent excess inventory.

What we changed: To address this growing use case, we packaged the most common opportunities seen across our customer base into the new Supply Chain Network Visibility App. This helps customers identify opportunities they can immediately take action on.

The customer need: Users wanted to tie granular insights to higher-level performance.

Initially, we provided a view of all materials (from finished goods to raw materials),  service levels for each material, excess inventory rates, and associated lead times (time to create the finished good, time to get the raw material, etc.). This was invaluable information for customers, but they wanted to understand the actual impact of these insights on supply chain performance. 

What we changed: To address this desire, we decided to merge the Control Center Application into the Supply Chain Network Visibility App. The Control Center was originally created to provide an overview of supply chain performance and has helped many customers. We packaged the Control Center’s high-level overview with transactional-level insights already in the Supply Chain Network Visibility App, helping supply chain managers understand the “why” behind their performance in one view. 

What are the key features of the Supply Chain Network Visibility App?

•  A value assessment dashboard gives you insights and recommends targeted actions to reduce excess and obsolete inventory, prevent excess replenishment, and improve service levels.

•  Upstream network perspective helps you understand the supply chain network’s impact on the delivery of finished products. It also surfaces potential root causes for upstream issues, like extended supplier lead times for raw materials. 

• Downstream network perspective helps you understand the impact of raw materials on the downstream supply chain network, including on the creation and delivery of finished goods. Similar to the insights you can get from upstream network perspective within the App, downstream network perspective surfaces potential root causes for downstream issues, like extended production lead times.  

• Inventory projection gives visibility into forward-looking KPIs, such as uncovered demand, excess supply, and days until stockout. 

• A management dashboard presents Procurement, Production, sales, and inventory metrics in an aggregated, accessible way.

What are the specific actions you can take in the Supply Chain Network Visibility App? 

In the Supply Chain Network Visibility App, you can take action to: 

• Reduce excess inventory and obsolete stock based on a historical view of demand and supply patterns, and identify legacy SKUs no longer in use within the supply chain network. 

• Prevent excess inventory by identifying materials at risk of excess based on projected demand and inventory on hand, allowing you to cancel or hold upcoming POs for any material in excess. 

• Initiate replenishments by proactively identifying upcoming demand that cannot be met based on existing and upcoming inventory on hand. 

The App also helps you analyze upstream and downstream processes to find opportunities to optimize your supply chain network’s performance, though actions like:  

• Identifying root causes of systematically low service levels, like a raw material that may be delaying production of the finished good. 

• Identifying raw materials at risk of delay due to extended supplier lead times and PO values at risk of delay. 

How have customers used the Supply Chain Network Visibility App so far?

So far, we’ve seen customers use the App primarily to reduce excess, a top-of-mind issue across industries. Here are some real ways we’ve seen Celonis customers take advantage of the Supply Chain Network Visibility App so far:

Example 1: Leveraging dashboards in the App to find cost reduction opportunities

One customer, a multinational CPG company, used customized versions of the App’s management dashboard and value assessment dashboard to identify ways to reduce cost within their maintenance, repair, and operations inventory. Through these dashboards, they can do things like: 

• Proactively identify excess inventory and inventory that is no longer consumed — and flag what can be scrapped 

• Search for needed material in nearby plants to avoid the effort, time, potential excess, and cost of purchasing it new

• Ensure purchasing SLAs are met within the correct lead times and cost structures 

• Identify and eliminate duplicate materials from master data to prevent excessive purchasing 

Within one month, the customer reduced $~270,000/M in costs by both preventing additional excess and preventing the purchase of duplicate materials. 

Example 2: Using the app for more strategic material planning

Another customer, a German-based chemical company, used the App to identify where they had excess and where their planning strategies could be optimized based on consumption and replenishment patterns.

They found that over half of the materials in scope had no defined planning strategy, which created excess stock throughout the different stages of their supply chain.

The team now uses Celonis to proactively notify material planners when they should hold off on replenishing stock. Celonis also recommends the best strategy for materials that have no strategy defined, additionally helping to reduce excess stock. Within 2 weeks of using the App, the team realized ~€800,000 in value by reducing costs tied to excess inventory.

Ready to explore what the Supply Chain Network Visibility App could do for your enterprise?

Check it out in the Marketplace.

Alejandra Quinones

Product Marketing Manager

Alejandra Quinones is a Product Marketing Manager at Celonis. A former Customer Success Manager who made the switch to Product Marketing, she’s passionate about helping customers understand complex tech so they can make the smartest choices for their needs.