Hitachi Energy + Celonis

“Advancing a sustainable energy future for all” – that’s the purpose of global technology leader Hitachi Energy. With a portfolio ranging from grid networks to sustainable data centers, “we help our customers to navigate the energy transition,” explains Michael Loechle, Hitachi Energy’s CIO. 

Not an easy task, considering Hitachi Energy needs to meet ever-growing demand across more than 90 countries while also driving their own S/4HANA migration, digital transformation, and sustainability targets.

“By 2050, we will distribute about three times the energy we do today,” says Armin Ploetz, CPO of Hitachi Energy. The challenge: To meet this enormous demand, hiring new talent alone won’t cut it. “We can no longer manually manage the data and reports we need to deliver,” says Ploetz. “We need to shift the people away from repetitive tasks towards data-driven decision-making.” 

Process Intelligence turned out to be the solution. With the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform, Hitachi Energy can understand how their business truly runs, enabling them to boost fact-based decision making and drive targeted automation — saving them thousands of hours per year.

Creating end-to-end supply chain visibility

Using industry-leading process mining technology, Celonis gave Hitachi Energy a living, breathing digital twin of their supply chain processes. “Celonis is like an x-ray of the company and our process transactions,” says Trina Faigao, Head of SCM Change Management and Continuous Improvement at Hitachi Energy. “It really allows us to understand our data even at the most granular level so we can address deficiencies.”

The Celonis platform combines these deep process insights with a decade of process improvement knowledge and AI. This gives stakeholders a single source of truth for easy-to-action insights. “With the click of a button, we have access to the data,” says Reto Bachmann, Hitachi Energy’s Head of Common Shared Services Supply Chain Management. “We can come to conclusions much faster.” 

For Bachmann, learning about Celonis was “eye opening”. He became the driving force behind “encouraging the entire organization to use Celonis.” Currently, Hitachi Energy’s five Shared Service Centers support the business with over thirty Celonis analyses to optimize their end-to-end supply chain and Purchase-to-Pay process. 

Freeing up thousands of hours through automation

With an intuitive platform for smart decision-making in place, moving employees towards more value-added work was next. Implementing Celonis Action Flows across Procurement and Accounts Payable, Bachmann and his team managed to automate repetitive tasks and even establish brand-new workflows.

“Action Flows help us tremendously to run our processes more effectively, faster and with better quality. They even help with compliance.”

Reto Bachmann, Head of Common Shared Services SCM, Hitachi Energy

The Celonis Platform contains hundreds of pre-built Action Flows that can trigger actions directly within operational systems like SAP, Oracle, and ServiceNow. One example: After moving to S/4HANA, Hitachi Energy faced new SAP requirements – such as entering comprehensive shipping data prior to receiving deliveries. By automatically reminding suppliers to submit this data, the team is saving thousands of hours annually. In total, Celonis enabled the CSS SCM function to drive productivity worth more than $1M.

From Action Flows to apps - creating custom solutions 

Spurred on by this success, Bachmann and his team partnered with Celonis on an innovation project to develop the Open Purchase Order Management App, introduced at Celosphere 2023. 

"Our buyers spent between 40% and 60% of their time on open purchase orders," says Bachmann. Most of that time went into entering PO data from SAP into tracking sheets. A huge manual effort, “and the data is likely out of date the moment it’s put into Excel,” explains Bachmann. 

Now, the app provides Hitachi Energy’s buyers with a single view to manage open POs, prioritize orders at-risk, and boost on-time delivery.

“The best thing Celonis has done for our Shared Service Centers are the Master Data App and the Open Purchase Order Management App. They are helping us run our processes much more effectively.”

Reto Bachmann, Head of Common Shared Services SCM, Hitachi Energy

To continue boosting productivity across other areas, Hitachi Energy has quickly moved on to building their own apps – starting with their Master Data App.

“We didn't have the cleanest master data and that prevented us from creating purchase orders automatically,” says Bachmann. With the customized Celonis App his team built,  they can easily identify data issues and fix them. 

“People get so excited about using the Celonis Apps, it even reduces their anxiety around going live with a new S/4 system.”

Reto Bachmann, Head of Common Shared Services SCM, Hitachi Energy

The team has launched a second custom solution, their Vendor Invoice Management App. “This app helps us connect our supply chain and finance functions and their people based on facts and data, rather than arguing about why an invoice hasn't been paid,” explains CPO Armin Ploetz. 

Towards a green future and intelligent processes

And Hitachi Energy is not slowing down. CIO Michael Loechle is looking forward to exploring the possibilities of AI in combination with Celonis.

In the meantime, Trina Faigao is using Celonis to drive Hitachi Energy's sustainability goals. Working together with Celonis partner Ventum, the group recently deployed the Celonis Material Emissions App. 

“This app gives us transparency on the emissions of the products we order,“ explains Faigao. “We can measure supplier emissions, take steps to reduce them, as well as monitor and report on our emission targets.” 

Hitachi Energy is also using Celonis for their sustainability reporting with the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) being an immediate focus. CBAM requires companies to disclose the import of certain materials to the EU and collect supplier data for accurate reporting. This is a manual and difficult process but Celonis helps automate tracking and orchestrates supplier data collection. “We don’t have the luxury of time. Regulations don’t wait for us,” says Faigao. “But Celonis is scalable. We can continuously enhance Celonis to meet new regulations.“

As for Reto Bachmann, the main force behind Hitachi Energy’s success with Celonis, he is excited to scale further and explore the latest Celonis capabilities. “Celonis is fundamentally embedded in everything we do. Currently, we are looking at the Orchestration Engine to automate processes end-to-end in real-time. It's one hundred percent the right thing to do.”