Smurfit Westrock + Celonis

Harmonizing business processes across a common SAP system is the core goal of Brian Dodson, Business Process Improvement Director and Celonis CoE lead at Smurfit Westrock. 

He explains how Celonis’ partnership with one of the world’s leading providers of paper-based packaging goes from strength to strength: from small beginnings in the European Finance department to 1,000+ users across the globe realizing millions of euros in value each year.  

Getting started with maverick buying 

Dodson worked in Smurfit Westrock’s European Finance department when he first used Celonis Process Mining and Action Flows to tackle and prevent maverick buying. Initially the aim was to have one or two central users in each country receiving automated alerts when purchasers didn’t follow defined procedures. 

However, Dodson realized that to really change established behaviors, buyers at the individual plants needed to receive these alerts directly, along with information on why their purchase order was non-compliant and what to do about it. Based on that logic, the company added around 50 Celonis users with at least one per plant. 

“We realized that the information Celonis gives you needs to be received by the person closest to the ability to make the change.”

Identifying maverick buying and proactively clamping down on it, enabled Smurfit Westrock to control expenses, drive savings, and boost supplier relationships.

Value and user growth go hand in hand 

The value that Smurfit Westrock gets from Celonis has grown exponentially, with the business currently realizing multi-millions. 

“I'm not saying that next year we'll be in billions, but millions and more than we are now. Every year it's multiplying in the millions.”

Expansion of its Celonis user base has been equally rapid. In 2023, Dodson created a Celonis Center of Excellence (CoE) within the Global Information Systems department to serve the North and South American markets as well as Europe. By the end of the year, with two new analysts on board, the CoE had between 15 and 18 live use cases in Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) and Accounts Payable (AP) – including the Duplicate Invoice Checker, Aging Credit Memos, Payment Term Checker and some custom apps. The user base had grown to 450.  

With proven success in P2P and AP, Celonis was getting interest from the C-suite, to the extent that they asked the CoE to help with a strategic stock-reduction objective. This catapulted use of Celonis to the next level, not just through the Inventory Management use case itself but also by reinvigorating the Finance use cases. Between January and June 2024, the number of internal users escalated from 450 to 1,050, with an impressive monthly active user rate of around 70%. 

Reducing stock levels with OCPM  

Expanding Celonis to Inventory Management was a strategic initiative, driven by the C-suite, to reduce spare parts stock levels and maximize working capital. 

Until this point, Smurfit Westrock had used traditional case-centric process mining to give a real-time view of single business processes. But for this Inventory Management use case, the CoE used more advanced object-centric process mining (OCPM) capabilities. This allowed multiple processes and systems to be linked together, creating a digital twin powered by the Process Intelligence Graph. 

In the past, different teams from different countries would come together with different inventory information and nobody could agree on numbers. With the Process Intelligence Graph, enabled by OCPM, the team brought together data from Maintenance, Production, Finance, and Procurement to deliver one single source of truth. Clarity and transparency into how these processes interact and influence each other, enabled better decisions around selling, transferring and disposing of excess stock. 

“Celonis takes opinions off the table. It's black and white, the data's there. So for me, it's not only a common language, but it takes the guesswork out of the job you're doing. It really makes people's jobs easier.”

Next, the CoE put preventative controls in place to make sure spare parts stocks didn’t build up again. Linking purchases to warehouse stocks in the Process Intelligence Graph, the team set up Action Flows to automatically inform users if they try to purchase something that's already in stock. 

“What I love about OCPM is it's so easy. If somebody asks for an additional piece of data or an additional deviation of the process they want to look at, it's so easy to bring that data in and to serve the business. It’s just the flexibility, the transparency, and the clarity you get to really deliver dynamic solutions and deliver quickly.” 

Process Copilot simplifies Inventory Management 

One issue Smurfit Westrock has had with Inventory Management is inconsistent master data. The same part can be called multiple different things in different systems, across different plants, making it hard to determine if that part is in stock and where it is located when users want to share inventory across plants. 

To solve this, the CoE uses an AI layer that harmonizes the data coming from source systems into front-end dashboards – delivering a clear and concise data set without the need to clean up the master data at the source. Users at any plant can communicate with the Celonis Process Copilot, which provides an effective and easy way to interact with inventory data and potentially share parts with other plants.

“I see Celonis as the accelerator to a lot of the initiatives. You have to align Celonis next to a key business initiative and that accelerates the business initiative. The way I see AI in Celonis is AI is the accelerator to the accelerator.”

Future growth enabled by Process Intelligence  

Four years ago Dodson was knocking on doors, trying to get into CFO meetings to explain what Celonis was. Now, the CoE is getting requests left and right from teams who are eager to start with Celonis. And the CoE needs to be sure that the initiatives they take on benefit the whole business and align with strategic goals. Celonis makes it easy to see where the business is getting value from current use cases, and to apply that knowledge to potential new use cases. 

“If there's a lot of transactions and a lot of information in the system we want to connect, then we'll pull that into the Process Intelligence Graph. If there's not, then you've already validated you don't have a business case there. And that's sometimes just as valuable.”

Smurfit Westrock plans to expand the CoE, and then look into other use cases across the business. Customer-facing use cases such as Order Management and Accounts Receivable are an area for the future, along with harmonizing more internal processes around Maintenance and Production.  

“For Smurfit Westrock and Celonis it's all about growth. I think we have the platform now, we have the alignment to the C-suite, and we're on their mind. We're currently used by maybe 300 entities across the business, but we want it to be 100% of the business."