Ingram Micro at Celosphere

This year, global technology giant Ingram Micro eliminated 50,000 labor hours by identifying opportunities for optimization and automation across its Order-to-Cash processes. 

That’s a huge win, and one that’s already directly led to better experiences and results for Ingram’s associates and customers. But it’s just one in a growing list of value-driving successes that the team has achieved with Celonis.

Ingram Micro’s SVP of Global Business Services (GBS) Jana Vondran walked us through this recent win, and shared how her team has been using the Celonis EMS to drive positive internal transformation during a time of immense change and disruption.

Process excellence enables Ingram Micro to deliver on its strategic mission

It wasn’t the first time Jana had spoken to us about her organization’s journey with Celonis. In a video recorded last year, she walked us through Ingram’s operational landscape — exploring why adopting and applying process mining and automation has been so valuable for them.

“Ingram Micro is a $50 billion company, with a huge transaction volume,” explained Jana. “We process millions of sales and purchase orders, so execution is extremely important for us. But a lot of our processes aren’t created by design — they’ve just evolved over our 40-year history.”

Ingram Micro’s mission is to deliver on the promise of technology for its customers. “If we can optimize our internal processes, we can give our associates more time to focus on customer interaction and better understanding how we can help them drive digital transformation,” explained Jana. 

Enabling execution excellence on a global scale

Today, Jana is making that a reality through process excellence COEs, established within the GBS team she heads up. 

“Through our Process Mining and automation CoEs, we’re identifying inefficiencies across the business, and using that insight to streamline all operations” she said. “We’ve got metrics that can be used to measure the success of our efforts across the organization. But we also work closely with country-specific teams to find the metrics best suited to help them achieve their goals.”

One focus area that’s recently emerged from conversations with country-specific teams is working capital. “Improving operations and reducing expenses is valuable. But we’ve found that by also using process mining to improve working capital, we can help drive cash flow and the bottom line for teams around the world,” explained Jana.

Leading process transformation amidst unprecedented disruption

Jana is certainly no stranger to change. In an interview for Celonis last year, she shared her approach to leading and implementing successful change in the fast-paced global technology industry. But the last 18 months have brought enough disruption to challenge even the most well-versed agents of transformation.

“When COVID hit, it was a big surprise for us – as it was for everybody else too,” said Jana. “In GBS, we had a two-hour window to transition 3,000 associates from a 100% in-office environment, to a 100% remote environment.”

A complete transformation in how the team worked naturally called for major process transformations too. “To work under these new conditions, a lot of our processes had to be revisited,” explained Jana. “Onboarding is a great example. It suddenly got a lot harder to integrate new people into the team, so that process had to be completely rebuilt for our virtual workflows.”

“Now more than ever, it’s really important that we listen to all of our associates,” said Jana. “We’ve made the shift to fully-virtual working, but this isn’t the end of the journey. We’re already seeing fatigue within our teams, and engagement is falling in some areas. Now, we need to keep track of that, and optimize the new processes we’ve put in place.”

As Jana and Ingram Micro define a new, optimized ‘normal’ for teams across the organization, Celonis will continue to support and enable global process and execution excellence. 

To learn more about Ingram Micro’s journey with Celonis, and explore all of the ways they’re using process mining and automation to improve execution globally, watch Jana’s Celosphere session on-demand.