Linde Gas + Celonis

Industrial gases are products people rarely think about, but without them, many industries would grind to a halt. From construction to food and beverage, and from hospital staff to welders: a huge number of industries rely on gas to get things done. And in most of these cases, these gas cylinders are business-critical: without them, assembly lines, filling stations, and even medical ventilators might come to a standstill.

As one can imagine, these cylinders aren’t exactly cheap. After all, they’re under extreme pressure and need to be transported frequently, all while meeting the highest safety standards. With this in mind, moving lots of them around can become a massive logistical challenge. Linde Gas Germany distributes gases in two million containers to around 100,000 customers every year. That makes their day-to-day business complex, especially in terms of:

• Specifications: Different types of gas require different types of cylinders, in various sizes and designs; they’re either distributed individually, or in bundles 

• Locations: The cylinder life cycle includes filling stations and a network of sales partners, who in turn supply customers.

• Maintenance: Cylinders need to be routinely serviced, regularly checked, and potentially repaired before they can be refilled, used for a customer order, and shipped. 

The issue for Linde Gas: every day, this level of complexity generates a vast amount of data, which traditional management systems often struggle to process. 

The challenge: Where are our cylinders, really? 

The global pandemic brought a new problem to light for Linde Gas. With work on hold for so many customers, there should have been significantly more containers available than Linde’s SAP system indicated. This highlighted a multi-layered problem:

• The data is only usable if it’s up-to-date Linde Gas had an immense amount of data available, but it wasn’t accessible to the users who needed the latest daily figures. “With two million assets moving every day — resulting in 30 million records per year — monitoring our cylinders in real-time was simply impossible,” said Katja Pohl, Productivity and Portfolio Controller. “We had to assume that there was a high, unknown number of potentially available cylinders. For an intelligent analysis of our data, we needed to find a different solution.”

• Customer satisfaction suffers from the lack of transparency Nothing scares customers away faster than incorrect information on availability, or orders being repeatedly rejected. Linde Gas was keen to avoid such frustrations at all costs.

• Investment in new assets was avoidable Customer satisfaction is a top priority for Linde Gas. To ensure supply, Linde Gas often purchased new cylinders when they might not have been necessary, leading to high, avoidable extra costs.

The solution: An up-to-date daily overview of all assets

Monika Purrucker heads up Digital Business Solutions at Linde, a Center of Excellence that develops digital solutions for the company’s business departments.  For her, Celonis was an ideal solution to tackle the “cylinder shortage” problem. Together with Susanne Gundelwein from her team and Katja Pohl, the expert in cylinder data and business processes on the user side, Purrucker quickly and effectively built an asset management solution:

“We had already implemented projects in Order-to-Cashand Procure-to-Pay with Celonis and had accumulated a lot of knowledge in the process. This enabled us to apply best practices to cylinder management quickly and easily,” Purrucker said. “This was really important to us as it’s a process for which there is no standard solution, but which is central to our business.”

Process mining, the core technology of the Celonis platform, works like an X-ray for processes. It shows you the current state of company processes using a realistic, data-based digital twin. This allows teams to understand where value is hidden in their processes — and how they can unlock it.

Today, Linde Gas Germany manages all cylinder data using the Celonis platform, connecting all plants and sales partners. The data is available in real time and can be used by all functions involved — from filling plants and Pricing Management to Sales and Controlling. The impact of this newly-gained transparency on the cylinder business is massive:

• Optimal inventory utilization: Linde Gas can nowactively track, maintain, and claim back cylinders

• Predictability: They can more accurately forecast supply and demand, and better prepare for it in the long and short term

• Cost savings: They avoid unnecessary new purchases 

• Productivity: Filling, maintenance, and transport operations run more effectively, and throughput times at their distribution partners’ sites are shorter

• Customer satisfaction: Due to increased availability, they reject fewer orders, and OTIF (On-Time In-Full) rate has also increased 

• Sustainability: By making the best use of existing resources, Linde Gas needs fewer new cylinders. New demand can be sourced regionally, which reduces the cost of transportation as well as the emissions that come with it.

“The great thing about this project was that we were able to implement it in an uncomplicated way thanks to existing best practices, and in close cooperation between Digital Business Solutions and the experts in the cylinder business."

Susanne Gundelwein, Associate Director Digital Business Projects, Linde 

Further digitalization and global efficiencies

The cross-departmental team is proud of the results they’ve achieved and they’re already looking at additional optimization projects to be rolled out gradually. “We’re a company that trades in tangible products, not everything is digital-first yet,” per Gundelwein. “But Celonis has shown our teams the potential of digital technologies. Today, more employees are thinking about the things they could improve within their domains, and they approach us with their ideas.”

And indeed, according to Monika Purrucker, Linde Gas is already taking their digital innovation further: “After the resounding success of our cylinder project in Germany, we’re now rolling it out globally. And we’re automating even more process steps in order to respond to customer requirements better and faster.”

Learn how you, too, can transform your supply chain with Celonis.