Reckitt + Celonis

Challenge: Driving transformation at speed

“Building a cleaner, healthier world.” That’s the mission that unites the 40,000 people working at Reckitt, the producer of hygiene, health, and nutrition brands.

Selling more than 30 million products daily – with well-known brands such as Durex condoms, Clearasil skin care, Lysol disinfectant, and Nurofen painkillers – the consumer goods giant has touched the lives of 1.8 billion people over the past ten years.

In an increasingly competitive market, Reckitt is aiming to accelerate their digital transformation, investing heavily in technologies like automation, AI, and Machine Learning.

Kuldeep Dudeja, IT & Digital Director at Reckitt, knows a thing or two about transformation.

He leads the Intelligent Automation Center of Excellence, whose mission is to drive Reckitt’s digital transformation at speed by refining processes, scaling automation, reducing waste, and unlocking efficiencies.

“We proudly call ourselves the ‘BFFs’ to the business,” said Dudeja during his keynote interview at the Celonis World Tour 2023 in London – alluding to his team’s mission to make their digital transformation bigger, fitter, and faster. “We are their go-to person whenever they have a business problem.”

But getting visibility into why things were going awry was no easy feat given the size and complexity of Reckitt’s process and system landscape.

“We’re talking about billions if not trillions of data points here,” said Dudeja. Celonis was the missing piece in their transformation puzzle.

Celonis journey: Unlocking tens of millions across the business

“Without Celonis, we would not be where we are today in our transformation journey,” said Dudeja.

Today, they are optimizing more than 40 processes across five business functions with Celonis, realizing tens of millions of dollars in value – while scaling to go after hundreds of millions tomorrow.

Reckitt started their path to value with the process mining vendor in 2019, focusing on Accounts Payable.

“We initially just wanted to have better control and visibility in Finance.

"We quickly realized that the power of Celonis goes far beyond process visibility...

It has great improvement power in driving our digital transformation.”

Impressed by quick wins in departments like Procurement and Order Management, Reckitt decided to go all in. They built a Center of Excellence (CoE) to infuse Celonis process intelligence and capabilities into almost all parts of their business.

Since then, Celonis has become their starting point and accelerator for every process improvement initiative at Reckitt, according to the IT & Digital Director.

Celonis helps his team identify and prioritize the biggest value opportunities, allocate the right resources, and know exactly what needs to be done to maximize ROI.

“It really has become this cross-functional, unbiased layer,” highlighted Dudeja. “It has done wonders.”

In Procurement, for example, the team uses Celonis’ intelligent automation capabilities, dubbed Action Flows, to optimize payment terms by 15 days on average for 63% of Reckitt’s suppliers - allowing them to unlock “millions and millions” in free cash flow.

Order Management: Improving On-time-Delivery, cutting manual work, and avoiding fines

One use case that’s especially close to Dudeja’s heart is Order Management, ​​where the team uses Celonis’ machine learning capabilities to boost on-time delivery.

“Our Order Management has to work like clockwork. And it’s never been feasible without Celonis Process Mining.”

Rather than chasing for approvals via email or trying to match Excel spreadsheets, the team uses the Celonis Open Order Processing App, which prioritizes their work by listing critical orders at risk and recommends where, when, and how they should take action.

With the App, companies can more quickly resolve order blocks for customers with a positive credit history or mark a high-value order for express shipping.

Dudeja said Celonis helps Reckitt mitigate fines for late deliveries, which has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and the company’s bottom line.

Interested in Celonis for Order Management? Watch our 3 minute demo. →

Using Celonis with their hygiene business in North America, Reckitt:

• More than doubled their no-touch order rate, from 34% to now 84%.

• Cut manual touches cut in half: from 4.2 times to now 2 times.

• Improved on-time delivery by 12 percentage points.

• Unlocked millions of dollars in value.

Results like these got the business fired up to roll out the Order Management use case globally and scale it beyond Reckitt’s internal system landscape.

Dudeja’s team plans to connect Celonis to their 3rd-party warehouse and logistics systems.

Their projection: Once they see their supply chain end-to-end, they will be able to drive exponential value.

Vision: “Scale, Scale, Scale”

Dudeja’s advice to the audience of hundreds of process experts listening in at the Bishopsgate in London:

“Put Celonis everywhere. Demand will come naturally.”

Early on, his Center of Excellence connected Celonis to as many source systems as possible and gave out unlimited licenses, so everyone could explore Celonis. And it clearly worked. “Now I have a different problem: I have more demand than I can serve and need to prioritize,” he added.

The numbers prove him right: Today, Reckitt has roughly 2,500 business users and 30 analysts working with Celonis, and a dozen use cases on the roadmap to be rolled out globally across processes like Purchase-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Accounts Payable, Procurement, and Order Management.

“I have one single goal. And that is scale, scale, scale. Scaling our existing use cases, scaling into new functions, new markets, new categories,” said Dudeja.

And as their use cases expand, so do their ambitions. “Now, we’re going after hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The IT & Digital Director is confident enough to link a number to that: “Our goal is to create ten times the value we create today by 2025.”

To that end, Dudeja is also keen to get his hands on new Celonis features. For him, Business Miner™ – aimed to guide non-technical users through process explorations via a question-and-answer model – is a no-brainer.

“It’s going to help us spread Celonis even wider.”

Want to see Business Miner™ in action? Join us for a short demo and a live Q&A with a Celonis expert.