ENGIE GBS + Celonis

Context: Leading the charge to carbon-neutrality one process at a time

As the climate continues to heat up, multinational energy business ENGIE’s raison d’être is to lead the transition to a carbon-neutral global economy through reduced energy consumption and more environmentally-friendly solutions.

Driving toward this goal while generating maximum value is no mean feat for a company with operations in over 30 countries, and nearly 100,000 employees working across a range of energy generation, network, and infrastructure businesses. That’s why ENGIE’s Global Business Support (GBS) team harnessed and focused their own energies on amplifying their effectiveness by optimizing their processes end-to-end, business-wide. Their focus: to simplify, standardize, and optimize business and support function processes, and to generate new synergies and new value thanks to friction-free processes.

While ENGIE GBS’s journey with Celonis began relatively recently – in 2024 – they already have active use cases in Procure-to-Pay (Accounts Payable & Procurement), as well as HR-related deployments such as Payroll Management and Talent Acquisition processes. It’s a clear indication of ENGIE GBS’s confidence in the Celonis platform’s capacity to overcome their first roadblock to business-wide process improvement: no objective, data-defined basis for transformation.

Challenge: No fact-based foundation for transformation

ENGIE’s lack of an objective data foundation for process optimization stands in the way of transformation success. When looking to address or improve specific areas of performance by reframing processes, the GBS team frequently receives pushback from the business.

“The questions we always get are, ‘Okay, can you prove that it's a problem?’ or ‘Can you prove that we need to do it in a different way?’” explains Christophe Dams, Head of Finance Transformation in ENGIE’s GBS team. Often this validation is hard to find – even when engaging consultants to examine ENGIE GBS’s processes, conducting interviews and desktop reviews. This cultivates valuable ideas and initiatives, “but we are missing facts, we are missing data,” says Dams.

Even where processes are revealed to be underperforming or KPIs are not being met, there is no way to pinpoint why, where, what to do about it and by which teams. What this energy provider lacks is accurate, end-to-end data to act for its GBS transformation.

That is, until ENGIE GBS deploys Celonis Process Intelligence.

“With Celonis, we now have the data to show what the process should look like: ‘These are the deviations from the ideal process that we’ve designed, and this is the impact that it creates’.”

Christophe Dams, Head of Finance Transformation, ENGIE Global Business Support

Solution: Continuous improvement on an EPIC scale

With Celonis on board, ENGIE GBS has set about consolidating their process mining initiatives within a dedicated program to establish continuous improvement. While program titles like “X-ray” conveyed ENGIE's newfound data visibility, they eventually landed on something more fitting for the project's scale and business impact.

“We chose an acronym with ENGIE inside, that’s more about what we really think about Celonis,” says Mathilde Guignot, Process Mining Director, ENGIE GBS. “We called the program EPIC [ENGIE’s Process Improvement Continue] – it’s about intensive effort to do great things.”

The GBS team is focusing on efficiency and boosting performance, using the tools and objective data provided by the Celonis platform to deliver both. Despite plugging in huge volumes of data across Finance, Procurement, and HR, ENGIE GBS is gaining the end-to-end process visibility and insights required to drive tangible change. Every click and every action taken can be tracked and analyzed, surfacing improvement opportunities.

Crucially, Celonis can change the nature of conversations with business partners across ENGIE’s different entities. Now the GBS team have the facts they need to show the business what is going on in their processes, what can be improved, what should be improved and why.

This root cause analysis is a game changer for ENGIE GBS. “With Celonis, we now have the data to show what the process should look like: ‘These are the deviations from the ideal process that we've designed, and this is the impact that it creates’,” says Dams. Facts and data can now replace opinion at ENGIE as the engine for supporting function process optimization.

And while ENGIE GBS is in the formative phases of their process improvement program, there’s already evidence there will be substantial value beyond this legitimate data foundation. One initial use case, addressing payment delays in Accounts Payable, for example, is expected to yield a 26% reduction in manual invoice touches and a 20% expected resource optimization. 

“With Celonis, we will go fast to find the insight and to create the value.”

Mathilde Guignot, Process Mining Director, ENGIE GBS

Vision: Value and process excellence as standard

ENGIE’s immediate vision for Celonis is about increasing depth and impact. “We are really at the stage where we want to capitalize on what we have done in order to begin to create the value... to improve the process and really show our partners that we can operate in a more efficient and effective way,” says Dams.

This will be a twofold process. Firstly, the GBS team will increase the buy-in, understanding, and application of Celonis within GBS. With an eye on fast, meaningful outcomes, they’re looking to make platform usage a day-to-day ‘business as usual’ activity across ENGIE GBS’s operations. More people, generating more insights, to deliver more value.

ENGIE’s future with Celonis is to evolve their use of the platform by exploring how different toolsets and new features can accelerate their process mining path to value. In particular, they’re looking to leverage AI-driven functionality such as Process Copilots and the Insight Explorer, to surface new insights and turn them into new value – all based on a rock-solid foundation of facts.

“We all wear these smart watches where we're tracking how many steps we take, how we're sleeping, and how good our health is. So if we do this in our personal life, why don't we have this way of thinking in our professional life? And that’s how I perceive Celonis. It's a kind of smart watch. You connect it to your data and it shows you how healthy your processes are.”

Christophe Dams, Head of Finance Transformation, ENGIE GBS