Celonis World Tour 2022 Paris: Safran, Arkema highlight process excellence

Aerospace company Safran and specialty chemicals and advanced materials firm Arkema headlined the keynote for Celonis World Tour 2022 Paris with a look at their respective process excellence efforts.

Speaking during the Celonis World Tour 2022 Paris, executives from Safran and Arkema joined Celonis Chief Customer Officer Malhar Kamdar, Celonis Regional Vice President Fadi Naffah and partners.

Also see: Celonis World Tour 2022: Everything you need to know

Jean-Marc Viallatte, Director of Shared Services Centers at Arkema, said Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) is used to visualize end-to-end Procure-to-Pay processes in a shared financial services center. The objectives are to increase the timely payment and contactless processing rates and the quality of invoice processing, he said.

Viallatte said Arkema has scaled Celonis via an approach that prioritizes core processes that deliver business impact. The other key initiative is to spread Celonis to foster citizen data analysts to democratize process excellence. For instance, a supply chain manager can get training on Celonis, and foster continual improvement of processes.

According to Viallatte, it's best to foster process excellence by breaking processes down step by step and empowering people to make them more autonomous citizen process analysts.

Safran's Arnaud Greffet, Vice President of the company's Supply Chain Group, said the company used Celonis to streamline order management processes and automate them. The primary goal was to standardize and automate order changes such as delivery date, price or quantity.

Greffet said Safran saw improved productivity, customer satisfaction and compliance by leveraging alerts and dashboards to better track things like payment deadlines, 1-click order rates and the time between creating a purchase order and completing it.

Going forward, Greffet said Safran plans on using Celonis to monitor the integration of acquisitions, expand into logistics and production and financial processes and improve master data management.

Both Safran and Arkema recommended that it's easiest to scale by taking things one process at a time. 

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief (former)

Larry Dignan is the former Editor in Chief of Celonis Media. Before joining Celonis, he was Editor in Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine.