Celonis for Procurement

There are many industry-wide challenges for sustainable procurement, such as the resources required to evaluate supplier performance. However, one of the greatest issues is disconnected processes. Supply chain managers lack the visibility and improvement knowledge to pinpoint underperforming suppliers and inefficient processes. Process Intelligence can help overcome this major challenge of sustainable procurement.

Improving the efficiency of your procurement process requires objective visibility into how your business runs. Process Intelligence uses process mining to give you that accurate view. This allows you to pinpoint value opportunities such as poor supplier performance, a low touchless order rate, or a high level of at-risk purchase requests. It also gives you improvement knowledge so you can effectively target value opportunities and make the procurement process more efficient.

The quality of procurement processes directly impacts a business’s exposure to costs. Optimizing any procurement process – such as purchase order processing – requires data to be centralized across source systems. This will increase visibility and allow the procurement team to intelligently prioritize actions and capture tangible value. Procurement process optimization can be achieved using Process Intelligence.

Common procurement challenges include time-consuming manual requisitions, a lack of transparency into available contracts, and limited standardization across PR-PO processing. But we believe it all comes down to your processes. Without visibility over your procurement processes, and dependencies across the business, it’s hard to pinpoint wider issues such as bottlenecks and supplier performance. The Celonis platform gives you that business-wide understanding, and helps you take action.

Strategies for overcoming common Procurement challenges mainly come down to improving supplier relationships, communication and tracking. That in turn leads to reduced Procurement costs by negotiating better terms and more efficient deliveries. Celonis Process Intelligence helps you achieve these objectives by giving you greater visibility over all your Procurement operations, pinpointing bottlenecks, miscommunication and underperforming suppliers.

The value of Procurement can be measured in a variety of ways including cost savings, speed of supply and delivery, sustainability impact, and quality standards. Common Procurement KPIs include request-to-order cycle time, first time right rate of POs, touchless orders, and supplier on-time delivery. Celonis Process Intelligence gives you the real-time, end-to-end visibility to see exactly what’s going on in your Procurement function, and take proactive action to realize value.

Effective Procurement can be defined in terms of delivery lead times, communication time lags, quality of the products supplied, pricing competitiveness, frequency of price changes, compliance with negotiated terms, substitutions made, and the number of back orders. Organizations can make their Procurement processes run more effectively with Celonis Process Intelligence by uncovering bottlenecks and disconnects and identifying improvement opportunities.