Framing Value Opportunities with Celonis

Accounts Payable Processes

Mission of the project

Marvillo, a medium sized manufacturing company focused on electronics, is modernizing their operations to digitize whereeer possible to gain a competitive edge. They would like me to examine their Accounts Payable process. Their strategic goals within the Finance department are to increase Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) and reduce costs. At the moment, they’re struggling to consistently meet their targets in these areas but don’t have any clear reasons why. As a process analyst I will investigate and analyze the value opportunities from the root causes.

Low Days Payable Outstanding

Based on the DPO dashboard, we can derive that the company is paying its suppliers quickly—faster than other companies might. We can use a payment term checker app, that monitors invoices at risk of late payment. When it detects such invoices, it notifies the accountant, who can choose to approve and pay, escalate to a manager, or keep the payment on hold if goods are pending

Late Payment Fees

We can reconstruct Marvillo's actual invoice-to-pay (I2P) process from system data (SAP, Oracle..), revealing: where invoices are entered late, how often paper invoices are used and where manual changes delay the flow. With Action Flows, we can alert Accounts Payable if an invoice is at risk of missing payment terms, notify Finance when invoices are still on paper or unapproved after X amount of days and flag invoices missing key fields that block processing. We can also use Celonis to track why invoices fail touchless processing, attempt to improve master data while creating a live Late Payment Fees Dashboard to track the top contributing vendors or teams, the trend of late payments and fees over time and Business value unlocked by process improvements.

Touchless Invoicing

With variant analysis, we can track how often net terms change from default, check whether mismatched or updated addresses cause invoice blocking and detect suppliers with a high number of address/payment term exceptions. Once that's established we Action Flows to trigger alerts when payment terms or addresses differ from the vendor master and automate data validation or flag to master data teams before invoice posting.

Duplicate Payments

Using Action flows and Machine learning, we can ensure that if a duplicate invoice is found, Celonis automatically sets a payment block on the duplicate in your ERP system and notifies relevant users. This stops the client from paying for the same goods twice, saving you money and time

Long Cycle Times

analyzing the root cause for long processing times for approval, we could implement Action Flows to automatically send reminders if a task has been with an approver for more than X days, escalate to a manager or backup approver after SLA breach and highlight approvals where no action has been taken within 3 days

Impact means the value realized by using the celonis platform. Value is what is considered to be important or valuable in your organization. such as activities that optimize working capital, reduce spend and costs or improve sustainability performance. Value typically traverses 3 phases: identify, frame, and realize. Each phase is activated through a set of specific Celonis tools. Here I used business miner, views and analyses with their unique features such as filters to visualize data through different variants, charts and tables

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