Published on the 21/08/2024 | Written by Heather Wright

Valuable insights guiding Horizon transformation…

Zespri is harvesting robust, quantifiable financial and non-financial benefits from new business processes and the addition of a process optimisation and mining toolset, including ‘hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars’ of benefits in its purchase to pay process work.

The kiwifruit co-op, which logged annual global operating revenue of NZ$4.2 billion in 2023/24, has been undergoing a major transformation program over the past four years, looking at both systems and processes, and is using the Celonis Process Intelligence platform to provide insight into the efficiencies and opportunities for improvements in business processes delivered via the transformation program.

“When we started to analyse our data in the platform, we saw the immediate opportunity to improve our procurement and purchase-to-pay processes.”

Dave Scullin, Zespri chief digital officer, says within the next year the organisation will begin using Celonis as part of the migration of its supply chain processes from SAP ECC to S/4Hana.

As previously reported by iStart, Zespri recently began ‘tranche 2’ of its NZ$160 million multi-year Project Horizon program to overhaul the foundations of Zespri’s business processes and systems. Tranche 2 will see all the organisation’s operations moved onto a single SAP S/4Hana platform, along with a portfolio of modular projects.

The organisation admits it had previously under-invested in its digital infrastructure, with some systems 20 years old as it embarked on Project Horizon.

Scullin says Celonis will be a key enabler of Tranche 2 work, enabling it to measure the performance of processes running in the existing ECC environment to its performance in S/4Hana.

“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,” Zespri says.

Celonis’ use so far has been focused around purchase to pay and order management.

Vendor invoice management cycle time has reduced by 27 percent, and purchase order conformance is up from 65 percent to 88 percent in 12 months.

Purchases without POs cause significant manual work, require additional approvals and reduce payment times, Zespri says.

As part of Project Horizon, Celonis has been used to continuously monitor non-PO rate across the organisation. Market finance managers were sent email alerts with a clear call to action when PO usage dropped, enabling teams to adopt new ways to proactively increase PO conformance.

The organisation says it’s also seen credit memo clearance improve by 68 days this year – credit memos that are not cleared against open invoices impact working capital and carry the risk of being written off. Weekly monitoring of credit memos via the Celonis Open Credit Memo app enables quick matching to invoices and the avoidance of write offs of old credit memos.

Potential duplicate spend has also been identified and prevented through the Celonis platform which uses fuzzy matching to identify duplicates that were similar but not equal.

“When we started to analyse our data in the Celonis Process Intelligence platform, we saw the immediate opportunity to improve our procurement and purchase-to-pay processes,” Scullin says.

He told YouTube’s AlexOnTech the speed with which valuable insights began to flow, and their robustness, had exceeded his expectations.

While he declined to provide specific figures for the financial benefits, he said in the purchase to pay processes ‘we have seen some really material financial value in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of benefits’ and expectations are high for similar results in other benefits as they begin to be analysed.

Ultimately Celonis will be used across order to cash, fruit quality processes and grower engagement processes. Zespri has 2,800 growers in New Zealand with a further 1,500 offshore growers, and expects to export a record 190 million trays of fruit in 2024.

Richard Matthews, Zespri business process analyst and Celonis centre of excellence lead, says the organisation is looking to grow Celonis’ adoption across the business.

“It’s that moment in time when they realise the objective visualisation of their processes and the opportunities for optimising their processes is now in their hands,” he says of showing users the tool.

“Zespri has a culture of data-driven decision making, and our users are familiar with traditional business intelligence tools. But with Celonis, they can do more than just see a snapshot of our data at one point in time. They can quickly and easily filter and drill down on a living digital twin of our processes, and get insights into how the business actually runs.

“I see the excitement in them knowing they are playing an important role in improving our business processes.”

In July, Zespri said it was starting to see the benefits of its Horizon investment. Tranche 2 is expected to unlock larger benefits as the company moves to a common platform and decommissions legacy systems and temporary system integrations.