Celonis for Supply Chain

While there are many industry-wide challenges for supply chains, such as fluctuating prices and delays, one of the major challenges in supply chain management today is disconnected processes. Supply chains are one mega-process made up of lots of micro-processes, all happening in systems that often don’t play well together and across departments that speak their own languages. Transforming one link can end up causing issues in others, so supply chain managers need to understand how their processes truly run in order to improve them.

Supply chain efficiency has direct impacts on your customers, in terms of shipping speed and accuracy. But a streamlined supply chain also benefits the business through reduced wastage, stronger supplier relationships, and improved sustainability performance. That’s why it’s important to have an efficient supply chain, and supply chain managers can use Process Intelligence to achieve this.

Optimizing inventory management ensures that you deliver customers what they want, when they want it - crucially without stock shortages or surpluses. The benefits of inventory optimization include keeping stock at the right level to improve working capital, while meeting your service levels and sustainability targets. The Celonis platform brings these opportunities to light.

One example of optimized inventory management is reallocating excess inventory to areas at risk of stockouts. This involves real-time inventory tracking and demand forecasting. The Celonis platform can automate many of these actions.

Supply chain optimization is enabled by having visibility over supply chain processes, and how they intersect with other functions, as well as knowledge of how to improve them. Process Intelligence is an enabler of supply chain optimization as it objectively models your processes and orchestrates automation to make them run more efficiently.

Opportunities to make supply chains run more effectively are typically found in business processes and internal operations. Disconnected systems and miscommunication between different teams often lead to an inability to identify areas for improvement, such as pinpointing underperforming suppliers. Consequences can include stock-outs, inventory overload, excessive transport costs, late deliveries, and incorrect packaging. A platform like Celonis can help bring these areas to light and fix them.

Processing an order requires work to be done across multiple departments, which means delays and disruptions are common. Celonis Process Intelligence gives you full visibility across all your open orders so you can intelligently prioritize and handle them, optimizing order processing and making sure every order gets to the customer on time and in full.

The effectiveness of your supply chain operation is dependent on your processes and your ability to optimize them. You therefore need an accurate, real-time, objective view of all your supply chain processes, which Celonis Process Intelligence can provide. With greater supply chain visibility, you can take action to balance inventory levels, target underperforming suppliers and lower warehousing costs. You can even use the Celonis platform to automate many of these improvement actions.