Campari + Celonis

A global producer of premium beverages like Aperol, Wild Turkey, Grand Marnier and of course Campari, the Campari Group has 22 manufacturing plants worldwide, and distributes its products in almost 200 countries. 

As Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group, explains, one of the company’s core values is togetherness. The organization is proud to know its products are used to enrich the special moments that people spend together with friends and family. So the most important thing for Campari is to provide exactly what its customers want – an exceptionally high quality product, delivered on time and in the right quantities.

“We are lucky to have amazing products that can be used during happy moments with family and friends. We really enjoy that people can toast to their lives together using our products.”

Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group

Buseghin has worked with Celonis since 2019, when Campari started using the technology for a purchase-to-pay pilot in Argentina. The team first adopted the platform to optimize their internal audit processes, but has since expanded at both group and local level, across all the markets where Campari operates, realizing millions in value. Campari is now on a continuous innovation roadmap, and is exploring the possibilities of AI through the Celonis partner ecosystem.  

Acting on end-to-end visibility 

For Campari to meet its goal of satisfied customers, its processes must run smoothly.

“At Campari we produce and sell spirits. So how we produce and how we sell are our core processes. If processes aren’t working, it means we are not able to produce or we are not able to sell, and we can’t meet our customers’ expectations."

Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group

Keeping the business running smoothly requires coordination across multiple functions, including supply chain, finance, marketing and sales. But with every function focused on their own roles and duties, there was a lack of visibility into what was happening across the group. With no end-to-end view of processes that cross multiple departments, one function couldn’t see the up-and downstream impact of their actions on the wider organization.

“We were missing clear visibility on everything that was going on in the group. Everyone had a clear knowledge of what was happening within their specific operation, but we didn't have an end-to-end understanding.”

Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group

The first challenge was to achieve that end-to-end view. After that, the goal was to understand all the events that contribute to value creation in the organization and enable intervention when something isn’t working as expected. Buseghin was keen to identify innovation opportunities to improve performance, increase efficiency, reduce manual activities and minimize errors, without excessive disruption to the business.

Realizing value across core lifecycles 

Celonis enables Campari to see how processes run across different departments and improve them, which has resulted in €5 million in realized value. This figure is calculated using a structured framework that includes improvements in cash flow, reductions in end-to-end lead times, and working time saved through automation. 

“Now we have a full picture and a clear understanding – end-to-end – of the correlation between events and between actions carried out by people. So everything is easier.”

Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group

Using Celonis, Campari analyzes three distinct process flows – the customer lifecycle, the vendor lifecycle, and the materials lifecycle. It looks at the events and steps that create value in each of those lifecycles and tracks key metrics to monitor whether processes are running as they should. When something is getting in the way of achieving KPIs within these lifecycles, Campari creates action plans with the relevant business function to drive improvement. The result is faster purchasing, faster production and faster selling. 

As an example, touchless rates are important KPIs in both the order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay processes. Before Celonis was introduced, all incoming payments were manually allocated to invoices in order-to-cash. Now 30% of incoming payments are automatically allocated. In purchase-to-pay, the touchless invoice rate for suppliers has increased from 50% to 80% since implementing Celonis.

This automation boosts efficiency and reduces errors. It also improves the employee experience by reducing time spent on repetitive, mundane tasks and allowing that time to be dedicated to more worthwhile activities.

“Every minute we free up for our Camparistas can be the key minute where they have the great idea that will help us to increase our value, to grow faster, or to delight our customers.”

Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group

Exploring AI with the partner ecosystem 

Buseghin feels Campari is still only at the start of its journey with Celonis. The intention is to cover all systems and end-to-end processes across the group. With new brands acquired every year, this is a continually expanding target. 

“The functions are the ones asking continuously, can I have more access? Can I analyze this specific performance? Can I drill down on a specific process that I want to understand better? So now it's a global tool for the entire organization.”

Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group

The next step on Campari’s process excellence journey is to co-develop an AI-powered collaboration agent with Rollio – a developer of AI-powered interfaces and agents and a member of the Celonis partner ecosystem. 

“One of the benefits of working with Celonis is the partner ecosystem that they bring with them. Rollio is a perfect example of a partner that is developing, together with Celonis, an innovative solution that will benefit us as customers.”

Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group

The collaboration agent will combine Rollio’s AI with Celonis’ Process Intelligence to expedite the resolution of blocked sales orders. It will bring together all the relevant people to approve the decision, as well as the process intelligence that explains the reasoning behind it — all within Microsoft Teams. 

It means everyone can collaborate in one place and benefit from the power of process intelligence, whether they are Celonis users or not. Campari employees can talk to each other and the collaboration agent using natural language. Someone on the credit team, for example, can ask the collaboration agent to find the status of a sales order and, if it’s blocked, the reason for the block. With all the relevant people in the chat, a decision can be reached and the team can then instruct the agent to take action to fix the issue. 

Using the collaboration agent will be like chatting to a highly efficient co-worker. It will reduce the amount of time employees spend searching for information in different systems, give them more time to make informed decisions, and speed up the time to resolution. It will also guarantee end-to-end accountability and compliance on specific processes. Campari expects it will not reduce lead times and manual rework, but also allow them to handle a higher volume of credit blocks as the company grows.

“After five years with Celonis, we are still eager to experiment to see what else we can achieve. What about artificial intelligence? What about automation? What about process executions? There is a long, long roadmap for improving, innovating and obtaining more from the technology.”

Laura Buseghin, Process Optimization & Automation Director at Campari Group