Freudenberg Sealing Technologies (FST) has been using the Celonis IT tool since 2017 to examine commercial processes and highlight ways to improve them. The migration to the cloud makes it possible to analyze a growing number of processes.
The long walls are covered in endless lengths of brown wrapping paper on which processes are hand-painted: People who work on GROWTTH and lean management have certainly outlined value streams in this way before, representing them graphically. The underlying thought: If you have a precise understanding of the current state, you can identify weak points in processes and make improvements.
That’s exactly what Celonis Process Mining does – not only in analog form but digitally as well, much more precisely and informatively. The IT tool reconstructs how commercial processes actually run, based on as much of the company’s data as possible. That creates transparency as a foundation for improvements. “Just as an x-ray machine illuminates the human body in the medical field, Celonis navigates commercial processes and visualizes them,” said IT expert Tomas Aguirre, CPIM Analytics.
In 2017, Celonis launched an order-to-cash management system at FST. Order-to-cash covers the sales process from the customer’s order, through order execution and preparation of the invoice, all the way to the incoming payment. Working with Celonis, FST is now examining the purchase-to-pay process, that is, the procurement process from the purchase requisition to the order, and even all the way to invoice processing and payment.
“We have been running it in the cloud since 2021 to take advantage of all the Celonis options and functions and to always ensure we are up-to-date. We are not hosting it on our own servers the way we did before. The technical term for that is ‘on-prem,’” Aguirre said. The migration of the cloud and its configuration took place within six weeks. “We made a couple of adjustments this year. All of the processes are now presented the way the Business Process Management and Supply Chain Management teams expect to see them,” Aguirre said.
Photo: Tomas Aguirre, IT expert at CPIM Analytics.
In the cloud, other data can be analyzed, including information from CRM processes. Or data that resides outside the SAP ERP system: for example, in an Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) system, like the one recently introduced at Pinerolo. Read more about it.
Transparency In Material Flow
With Celonis, the material flow from raw material to the finished product is recorded and visualized in overviews – the so-called cockpits – that are completely up-to-date. It is possible to answer a number of questions with the push of a button. For which preliminary products, components and finished parts is the raw material intended? At which FST plants is it being processed? For which customers? The system accesses information worldwide. “This material flow transparency equips us to react appropriately to current bottlenecks,” Aguirre said.
