Celonis, the global leader in Process Mining and Process Intelligence, and Zespri, the world’s leading marketer of kiwifruit, highlighted the significant success of their efforts to optimize business operations, improve working capital and deliver millions in value realized.
“When we started to analyze our data in the Celonis Process Intelligence platform, we saw the immediate opportunity to improve our procurement and purchase-to-pay processes. Celonis has been instrumental in enhancing our processes at Zespri helping us to drive better outcomes for our people and our customers, and more value for our growers,” said Dave Scullin, Chief Digital Officer of Zespri.
Zespri is 100 percent owned by current and former kiwifruit growers, working with 2,800 growers in New Zealand and 1,500 growers offshore managing one-third of the global kiwifruit volume across 59 countries. In 2024, it expects to export a record 190 million trays of fruit. In 2023/24, Zespri generated annual global operating revenue of $4.2 billion NZD.
“Zespri is a New Zealand success story, and Celonis is proud that our market-leading Process Intelligence platform is enabling the company to drive positive change, deliver millions in value and billions of nutritious kiwifruit around the world,” said Pascal Coubard, VP of APAC at Celonis.
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Changemakers: Driving transformation, delivering tangible value
In 2020, Zespri embarked on Project Horizon, an ambitious multiple-year effort to transform the company’s processes and systems—some of which were 20 years old. As part of this modernization program, it began working with Celonis and TEC150, one of Celonis’ regional partners, in 2022. The initial focus was in Purchase-to-Pay and Order Management.
Using the Celonis Process Intelligence platform, which leverages the latest process mining technology and AI, Zespri was able to increase productivity, reduce duplicate invoices and clear credit memos quicker. In the 18 months since the collaboration started, the team was able to achieve:
- Reduction to its Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) cycle time by 27%: Given the volume of fruit Zespri ships annually, slow payments can have a significant impact on the Purchase-to-Pay process. Leveraging Celonis for VIM, the company was able to reduce cycle times by 27%.
- Purchase Order conformance increased from 65% to 88% in 12 months: Purchases without POs cause significant manual work, require additional approvals and reduce payment times. As part of Project Horizon, Zespri started to use Celonis to continuously monitor the non-PO rate across the organization. When PO usage dropped, market finance managers were sent email alerts (through Celonis Action Flow automations) with a clear call to action, enabling the teams to adopt new ways to proactively increase PO conformance.
- Credit Memo clearance improved by 68 days in 2024: Credit memos that are not cleared against open invoices impact working capital and carry the risk of being written off. The team deployed the Celonis Open Credit Memo App and began weekly monitoring of credit memos, which enabled quick matching to invoices and the avoidance of writing off old credit memos.
Looking to the future: Optimizing Zespri’s Supply Chain and supporting SAP ECC to S/4HANA migration
Building on Zespri’s success with Celonis and TEC150 in their core Finance functions, the team plans to expand its use of the platform to further support Project Horizon. Within the next year, it will begin using Celonis as part of the organization’s migration of its supply chain processes from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. Celonis will enable Zespri to measure the performance of processes running in the existing ECC environment (the as-is state) to its performance in S/4HANA (the to-be state). Monitoring the delta between the “before” and “after” states as processes are migrated will be key to ensuring the migration is delivering optimal performance gains and Zespri is achieving its supply chain resilience goals.
SOURCE: Businesswire