How BD Uses Celonis Process Mining to Optimize Finance Processes

When we started using Celonis, we were seeking to understand the health of our processes and gain insights around bottlenecks and opportunities with Order to Cash, Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable processes. Celonis is an entirely different kind of system and a different way to analyze our information. Rather than simple dashboards and metrics, Celonis provides visibility to the underlying drivers of those metrics, enabling insights to areas of friction.

BD is one of the largest medical technology companies in the world, with over 65,000 employees and multiple ERP systems. Celonis has helped provide visibility into millions of dollars in opportunities, in areas like increased productivity and reduction in spend.

We have focused on a few points of friction, to make changes and create a return on our investment, while showing the power that the product could have on end to end processes.

For example:

Discovering Lost Cash Discounts

Within our Accounts Payable process, Celonis analysis highlighted an opportunity for BD: lost cash discounts. We were able to isolate a small number of vendors which accounted for the majority lost discounts, understand why the losses were occurring, how to impact change and enable better use of our working capital in the future. This is the kind of laser targeting that process mining technology allows us to perform when identifying the root cause of an issue.

Accelerating Internal Audits with Advance Visibility

Internal audits are a time-intensive, detail-oriented and necessary internal safety mechanism for companies. We have been exploring ways to apply Celonis to our audit process and provide meaningful visibility to risks and opportunities.

Our team has been using the Celonis tool to analyze the Procure to Pay and Vendor Master business processes, identifying the full population of transactions prior to audit fieldwork. Analysis performed on this data has allowed us to target specific risk-based scenarios for review, resulting in more value-added engagements.

Internal audit also has an in-depth understanding of company processes and opportunities. A combination of this knowledge along with the Celonis tool is allowing us to identify meaningful areas of opportunity for our businesses. Celonis can highlight and visualize these opportunities.

We have found Celonis to be particularly helpful in articulating issues and translating “myths” in the company to actual instances and facts and quantifying their impact. The Internal Audit use cases are in the early stages, but we see many opportunities here.

The Future of BD Process Mining for Finance

Celonis provides visibility across end-to-end processes, a view that aligned departments and areas of responsibility. Whereas continuous improvement opportunities are typically focused on one area, Celonis can highlight opportunities across the spectrum – and their relative impact to cycle time, rework and other factors.

Greater insight into upstream issues or downstream impacts is an important factor to drive change management and real business outcomes. BD is committed to this journey. New system user adoption takes time, however we believe that understanding our process data is critical to enabling process improvement.

Barbara Infante

Director of Business Process and Analytics, Becton, Dickinson & Company (BD)

Barbara Infante is the Director of Business Process & Data Insights at BD, a medical devices and technology company. She’s held roles in Finance, IT, Investor Relations, and Business Process in her 18 years with BD. Her recent focus is on business process improvement opportunities for the Company.