EDP + Celonis

“We realize that the world is changing, and if we don’t create flexibility to prepare for the uncertainty of the future, we’ll be in trouble,” said Allen Vasconcelos, Head of Digital Hub within the Digital Global Unit at EDP. "Our main goal is to prepare the company for a very different future where digital plays a key role.”

To kickstart their goals for digital transformation, EDP Comercial turned to the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) to maximize business agility across departments, achieve seamless execution, and deliver faster, more reliable customer service.

Transforming EDP Comercial's processes and culture

From the start, Allen Vasconcelos’ goal has been to empower business units across every department with digital tools and resources.

EDP Comercial set out by creating a collaborative digital environment through the Celonis EMS, which allowed teams to review and measure their execution capacity across departments and work together to take action on their insights.

“What we are doing here we call digital transformation, but what we are actually doing is driving a business transformation,” said Vasconcelos. “It is mainly to look for solutions that can deliver not only flexibility and different ways of doing things, but also to give some empowerment to the business units.”

With the help of technologies like Celonis, Vasconcelos and his team are creating a new culture at EDP Comercial in which digital resources are accelerating operations, boosting efficiency, providing agility, increasing customer satisfaction, and bringing teams together in a new collaborative environment.

Spreading agile methodology across departments

With flexibility being one of the main goals of EDP Comercial's digital transformation initiatives, Vasconcelos is taking the agile methodologies commonly used in their IT department and incorporating them in all other business areas, like Marketing and Human Resources. The company hopes to merge its IT department with all other business areas — a move the organization believes will be necessary among companies of all industries and sizes in the near future.

To achieve this breakthrough, EDP Comercial is equipping business units with the Celonis EMS and its extensive toolkit, which includes process mining, machine learning, and automation capabilities designed to leverage predictive analytics and actionable insights. The goal is to eliminate inefficiencies from process gaps.

Generating operational process improvements

In a similar vein, Ricardo Henriques, Deputy Director of Technological Transformation Programs and Automation of EDP Comercial, is digitally transforming the company's sales-to-debt cycle and customer care business units to create an accelerated, efficient, and more collaborative environment. According to Henriques, Celonis has been increasingly effective in empowering EDP Comercial’s Finance departments to make quicker, sharper decisions and adapt to changes that they wouldn’t have been able to detect without the EMS.

EDP Comerical’s operational departments started using Celonis to connect all the B2C processes throughout the Sales-to-Debt cycle. Today, they are using the EMS to analyze and control process performance, identify process improvements, and increase automation.

“Regarding regulatory and compliance issues, Celonis helps us by providing new perceptions of objectivity and transparency in our processes,” said Henriques. “So we know now how our processes are truly running in the real world, which gives us more control over our processes and helps us make faster, more effective decisions.”

"Digital is a people thing."

For EDP Comercial leadership, it's been clear from the start that increasing the use of digital tools isn’t meant to remove the human element from a business, but to empower employees with the means to work smarter and faster. These changes have the power to drive higher-quality customer service.

Today, Vasconcelos and Henriques plan to further empower their business units and create more enterprise agility by accomplishing their goal of putting 85% of EDP Comercial's systems in the cloud, ensuring the flexibility and the time to market they need to face the near future.

“Digital is a people thing,” says Vasconcelos. “That’s a statement from our CEO, and that’s exactly what we are doing here now.”