Celonis & Zespri celebrate success in process optimisation

Celonis, a global leader in process mining and process intelligence, has reported significant success in its collaboration with Zespri, a prominent marketer of kiwifruit. Zespri has utilised Celonis' platform to optimise business operations, enhance working capital, and deliver substantial value.

"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. 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," stated Dave Scullin, Chief Digital Officer of Zespri.

Zespri, wholly owned by current and former kiwifruit growers, collaborates with 2,800 growers in New Zealand and 1,500 growers overseas, managing approximately one-third of the global kiwifruit volume across 59 countries. The company anticipates exporting a record 190 million trays of fruit in 2024. In the 2023/24 fiscal year, Zespri generated an annual global operating revenue of NZD $4.2 billion.

Pascal Coubard, VP of APAC at Celonis, remarked, "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."

In 2020, Zespri launched Project Horizon, a multi-year initiative to modernise its processes and systems, some of which were over two decades old. As part of this initiative, in 2022, Zespri began collaborating with Celonis and its regional partner TEC150, initially focusing on purchase-to-pay and order management processes.

Leveraging Celonis' process mining technology and artificial intelligence, Zespri has achieved considerable improvements in productivity. The company has reduced duplicate invoices and cleared credit memos more swiftly. Notable achievements during the 18-month collaboration include:

Reduction of Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) cycle time by 27%: Due to the high volume of fruit shipped annually, slow payments significantly impact the purchase-to-pay process. Utilising Celonis for VIM, Zespri reduced cycle times by 27%.

Increase in purchase order conformance from 65% to 88% in 12 months: Purchases without POs require extensive manual work, additional approvals, and prolong payment times. Through Project Horizon, Zespri used Celonis to monitor the non-PO rate continuously. Automated alerts were sent to market finance managers when PO usage dropped, prompting timely action to enhance PO conformance.

Improvement in credit memo clearance by 68 days in 2024: Unresolved credit memos affect working capital and risk being written off. By deploying the Celonis Open Credit Memo App and conducting weekly monitoring, Zespri swiftly matched memos to invoices, preventing write-offs of old credit memos.

Prevention of potential duplicate spending: Zespri employed the Celonis Duplicate Invoice Checker App to identify and prevent duplicate payments, thereby aiding in the accelerated recovery and avoiding a negative impact on working capital. Fuzzy matching was utilised to detect similar, though not identical, duplicates, and regular weekly checks by accounts payable teams mitigated payouts.

Building on its success with Celonis and TEC150, Zespri plans to extend the use of the platform to support Project Horizon further. Within the next year, Zespri will harness Celonis in its transition of supply chain processes from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. This will enable performance measurement of processes in the current ECC environment and comparison to their performance in the new S/4HANA environment. Monitoring this transition will be essential for ensuring optimal performance gains and achieving supply chain resilience goals.

Richard Matthews, Business Process Analyst and Celonis Centre of Excellence Lead at Zespri, expressed optimism about the future use of Celonis within the organisation. "We are looking forward to growing Celonis adoption across the organisation. When I show people how easy Celonis is to use and how powerful it is, I see them reach that 'aha moment'. It's that moment in time when they first realise the objective visualisation of their processes and the opportunities for optimising their processes is now in their hands."

Matthews further noted, "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."