Syngenta + Celonis

Syngenta, a leading global company in the agricultural sector, is known for its innovative approach to crop protection and seed development. Headquartered in Switzerland, the company operates in over 100 countries, helping farmers across the globe to grow high-quality crops. While Syngenta's significant growth is a testament to the company's success, it came along with more operational complexity — and some production inefficiencies.

Opportunity in master data for production efficiency

Ensuring safety and compliance is a top priority for companies in the chemical sector. To ensure traceability of products and abide by legal requirements, Syngenta’s master data needs to be robust and accurate.

In the past, production runs had to be stopped when materials weren’t synchronized, information was duplicated, or a single SAP field didn’t get populated. With data scattered across systems, emails, and Excel sheets, the Master Data Management (MDM) team recognized it needed to be more efficient when investigating the root causes of data issues. 

“Every production stop means losing time and money.“

Cristina Destri, Digital Control Center and Insights Lead, Syngenta

Given that a production stop — as well as the data cleansing from problem identification to correction — could take anywhere from a couple of hours to a few days, it’s easy to understand the impact on working capital, logistics, customer satisfaction, as well as service. 

How Celonis helped prevent thousands of production stops

With Celonis, the market leader in process mining platforms, Destri and her team changed the rules of the game. Supported by Celonis partners Apolix and InfoSys, her team was able to connect systems, processes, and teams for the first time to proactively steer their production and master data management. 

So how does it work? Process mining, the core technology of the Celonis platform, delivers a living, moving digital twin of their processes, end-to-end. Think of it as an X-ray that shows how the process — any process — actually runs. By connecting data from all common IT systems and adding a decade of process knowledge and AI, Celonis enables teams to understand where value is hidden and how to capture it. 

“When I first saw an analysis in Celonis, it was like a dream come true. I knew we had finally found a way to reduce the complexity of our processes.“ 

Cristina Destri, Digital Control Center and Insights Lead, Syngenta 

With Celonis’ intelligent automation capabilities powered by AI, dubbed Action Flows, the MDM Team can now: 

• Get automated alerts about inaccurate/incomplete master data fields,

• Drill deep into data issues (for instance, see how many materials are missing a serialization number, how many orders they’re assigned to and when the next production run is scheduled), and

• Take timely action to prevent production stops with Celonis recommending the right actions to fix missing/inaccurate master data.

In just three months, the MDM team prevented over 2,100 production stops — and over 4,200 in ten months. This huge accomplishment helped Syngenta unlock millions in working capital and save approximately 30,000 hours of rework. 

And that’s only the start. “We still have many more untapped opportunities to do this proactive data cleansing”, says Destri.

Boosting automation in Order-to-Cash

Another area where Syngenta made impressive strides early-on is in Order-to-Cash. Here, Destri’s Team is using Celonis to strategically push automation and increase productivity  across 40+ countries and subsidiaries.

Using Celonis’ benchmarking capabilities, the team could see which countries had untapped potential to increase the automation of activities like the creation of sales orders, invoices, and delivery notes.

Celonis’ process insights helped the team challenge the business to reduce unnecessary rework, such as automated order blocks, or changes in routes, plants, dates, incoterms, and more.

The results are astonishing:

• In Poland alone, Destri’s team cut 148 days on average from their Order-to-Cash cycle time -  a productivity boost that helped Syngenta deliver faster, and hence bring more cash through the door.

• Globally, Syngenta cut 72,000 hours through automation and reduction of manual rework. And that’s only in the 24 countries that have already adopted the solution.  

“It’s fast and easy to get the data, analyze the processes, and discover new value opportunities with Celonis.“

Cristina Destri, Digital Control Center and Insights Lead, Syngenta 

Reinforcing the culture of continuous improvement

Today, Syngenta is optimizing 20+ processes with Celonis. 

More importantly, their Celonis journey reinforced their strong culture of continuous improvement and innovation. Employees are now equipped with data-driven insights, enabling them to make informed decisions and spend their time on tasks that really matter. 

“The possibilities with Celonis are infinite. Only imagination can hold us back.“ 

Cristina Destri, Digital Control Center and Insights Lead, Syngenta