That approach was to select and implement Celonis, a market-leading process mining and execution management solution. Celonis is designed to work extensively with cloud-based tools, and already had many credentials in the procurement domain. For these reasons, it was a particularly good fit for our needs.
Gaining powerful visibility
Our Procurement Plus team started with out-of-the-box capabilities like process mining and analytics dashboards, focused on validating and reviewing order and invoice processing data. By simply leveraging the basic capabilities of process mining, we gained powerful visibility into our processes. For example, in requisitioning through SAP Ariba across 50 countries, we detected 14,000 ways a requisition could pass through the system.
The findings demonstrated just how much opportunity Procurement Plus had to drive standardization. We are using these insights and the powerful visual flows created by the tool to have fact-based conversations with teams about their processes, to identify and remove bottlenecks, and to simplify processes.
Leveraging these insights, we met with the team of one particular country to address their unusually high 60-hour average requisition approval cycle time. The Celonis visual flows showed the extent of process variation in comparison to other countries. The tool’s flexibility, which allows filtering and different views, enabled us to respond in real time to users’ questions. The visualizations led to the agreement on a series of actions to improve the local process. The changes and automations implemented reduced the cycle time by 75 percent to just 15 hours.
Our Procurement Plus team continues to use Celonis insights to remove friction from our processes and drive the change needed to advance P2P standardization and simplification Accenture-wide. We moved from simple to more complex use cases, and in that process, we have built customized analytics and expanded into using the native execution and automation functionalities of Celonis.
Taking a methodical approach
The team is taking a methodical approach to addressing challenges not only around standardization, but also around addressing non-compliance, improving the quality of execution and enabling delivery efficiency. At the same time, the team is addressing solution and customization gaps in our cloud tools.
Our approach includes the following aspects: