Celosphere 2024 | Abhi Banerjee, Vinmar International

Clips
News
More from Celosphere 2024

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host

theCUBE Research

Savannah Peterson

Principal Analyst & Host

SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

Harnessing automation for global efficiency: Vinmar taps Celonis for logistics success

More than simply quickening workflows, automation exists to keep businesses at peak functioning.Vinmar International, a distribution company with $5 billion in revenue, began its digital transformation with Celonis SE two years ago. Starting from process mining, the company has since transitioned to implementing Celonis’ Sales Order Execution App to establish touchless logistics and identify potential delays and risks proactively.Vinmar’s Abhi Banerjee talks with theCUBE about how the company leverages touchless logistics, boosting efficiency, on-time delivery and customer satisfaction

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Logistics: Automation's Role in Improving Shipment On-Time and Work/Life Balance

play_circle_outline Future outlook on network connectivity and role of Celonis Orchestration Engine

Info
Transcript

Abhi Banerjee, Vinmar International

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host theCUBE Research

HOST

Savannah Peterson

Principal Analyst & Host SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

HOST

Abhi Banerjee, the director of digital transformation at Vinmar, discusses how Celonis has optimized their processes through process mining and automation. The Orchestration Engine automated the sales order process, improving efficiency. Abhi emphasizes the importance of connectivity in the distribution industry. Celonis's Execution App provides easy configuration and real-time risk assessment, making the automation journey smoother for Vinmar, enabling them to focus on problem-solving and customer satisfaction.

explore Keep Exploring

What is the biggest Key Performance Indicator that the speaker personally focuses on and how does automation help them get closer to perfection in terms of shipment on time? add

What role will Celonis Orchestration Engine play in the next five to six years in the focus on connectivity between suppliers, distributors, and customers in major software and distribution systems? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Abhi Banerjee, Vinmar International

search

Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, efficiency fans, and welcome back to Munich, Germany. We are here at the very end of day two of Celonis Celosphere. My name's Savannah Peterson. As you can imagine, I'm sitting here with Rob Streche, just like I have been for the last few days. Final segment with a guest.

>> I'm excited. I think that I could go all night long, because these guests have been awesome, talking about their stories and where they really ... how they got into this has been very fascinating and very wide-ranging as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely, and it makes the platform and the solution feel very real. Abhi, thank you so much for bringing your wonderful customer story here today. How're you doing?

>> Very good. Thank you for having me here.

Savannah Peterson

>> You've still got a big smile on your face and a lot of energy.

>> I do.

Savannah Peterson

>> How have the past few days been?

>> Fantastic. I'm so pumped up, you have no idea.

Savannah Peterson

>> We love to hear that, and I'd say that Celonis loves to hear that as well.

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Tell us a little bit about your role and Vinmar, big company, been around for a while. Give us an overview.

>> Sure. My name is Abhi Banerjee, and I'm the director of digital transformation at Vinmar. Vinmar is a distribution company, and it's a $5 billion revenue, and we distribute mostly chemicals and plastics around the world. So every refinery is a potential supplier for us, and every customer which uses plastic molding is a potential customer for us. So yeah, it's a very heavy logistics company.

>> I was going to say, yeah, so supply chain and logistics seems like there's a theme of that here, funny enough. And process intelligence really seems to factor into helping people optimize that. But where did you guys get started with Celonis, and when was that?

>> Absolutely, actually my boss, the CEO of the company was a very visionary person, young, dynamic. He fell in love with Celonis and he hired me to install Celonis in Vinmar. So when I started the journey with Celonis two years ago, I didn't know anything about Celonis. But the journey has been very fruitful both for Vinmar and me personally. And I'm so excited to be here with you guys.

>> So what was the first use case that you figured out to go after?

>> Absolutely. So like every other customer, we started looking at process mining to find inefficiency in processes. Very early on, I was fortunate enough to see application called Execution App, the Sales Order Execution App. I don't know if I go into a little bit more details. Process mining, what it does is it looks at the path and tells you how you can improve for the future. While the Execution App actually looks at future and prevents you from making mistake now, looking at the implications of that in the future. So that is such a powerful for us. So what we did is we quickly changed direction and started implementing what we call a Sales Order Execution App which is nothing but a glorified risk management, risk that you prevented to ship on time. So the more we mitigate the risk up front, the more we are able to ship on time and more happy customers. That's the journey with Celonis with Vinmar.

Savannah Peterson

>> You're absolutely trying to future-proof yourself there.

>> Exactly right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Making sure that there's no landmines lurking out there. In my notes, I see you've got 50 offices in 35 countries and sales in 110 countries. That is massive reach.

>> It is massive. At any given time, we have thousands of sales orders open in our system, and we have large number of our workforce just dedicated to make sure that our customer receive the order on time. So that heavy lift was a perfect use case for Celonis, because Celonis Process Mining Engine can be fine-tuned to make sure that we identify the risk well in advance. Still, we mitigate the known causes, because there are certain situations that are beyond our control. But the ones that are in our control definitely can be mitigated with the help of Celonis

>> And you said your CEO was very visionary in bringing you in to really go down this path.

>> Exactly.

>> Where do you see this expanding within there, within your company?

>> So I report to my boss. His name is and his vision and my marching order is to make logistics touch less. Let me expand on that a little bit, because that's where the world is moving toward. There is no reason why a sales order can move through the sequence of events all the way from logistics and fulfillment to invoice by Celonis automation. Now, granted, there is a subset of sales orders that will need some human intervention, because things have not give according to plan. But the vast majority of them surely can be automated. So that's a vision that I have marching orders to fulfill, and that's the reason why I was so vocal in the concept of Orchestration Engine. Orchestration Engine, and this by the way, when I started implementing SAP, or sorry, Celonis ... SAP and Celonis synonymous for me. It's a-

>> They work together, yeah, yeah.

>> Exactly right, so yeah. Around a year and a half ago, I came across this concept of Orchestration Engine. At that time, it was not very well known across all the Celonis customers. Very few of us actually knew about it, and I was one of the first of the batch to actually try. We have successfully implemented it for one of our business units. This is a fairly large business unit, more than $700 million, which automatically, without human intervention, is able to take an order for shipment all the way to actual fulfillment and is managed by Celonis Orchestration Engine. So very exciting.

Savannah Peterson

>> And that process is completely automated now?

>> Correct, as far as things don't go outside the plan deviation.

Savannah Peterson

>> Of course, of course.

>> So we may have a catastrophic incident where a human intervention is required. If not, then yes, automatically, we push it through the system.

Savannah Peterson

>> So what sorts of benefits do you receive from that? I can imagine you're saving money. You're saving time. Your customers are getting more value from the transaction because it's getting there quicker and more efficiently.

>> So one of the biggest KPIs that I personally focus is shipment on time. Any automation that we do allows us to get closer to the perfection. Perfection is 10 out of 10, but let's assume that we come close to it. We reach 95% threshold. Then it's a huge win for us. Automation gets us there, and most importantly, it improves the work/life balance of our employees, because employees don't have to do the mundane, repetitive task. A human is best used when they solve problems, and that's what they're doing. We're making sure that our workforce is focused on solving problem, while Celonis is focused on moving the needle all the way to invoice. That's how we divide the work.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's so critical. People talk about automation or AI as taking jobs. It's not.

>> It's not.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's taking the boring out of our jobs. It's taking the repetitive out of our jobs and letting us do purpose driven, really valuable work. What sort of creative solutions do you think you'll be able to create with the time now that your team has to do more impactful things?

>> Customer satisfaction. In our line of business at a distribution company, mostly distributing, we do have a little bit of manufacturing under Vinmar International, but we are 90% just distributing. Customer satisfaction rates number one, and that can be done if we dedicate our workforce to make sure that customer has a clear understanding where they are in terms of receiving the shipment. That can be done if I can take out some of the work that they do to make sure the shipment is reaching on time, rather than focusing on the mundane activity which they can be focused on customer to make sure they know exactly where it is. And technology has gone a long way to do that for us.

>> So I just was talking to the guys that won the game changer award around network and things like that. What things are you looking at? Because it would seem that you're in distribution. It would seem like something like network is something that you could foresee potentially helping your help from a supply chain perspective, especially on the distribution side.

>> Absolutely. This ecosystem, let me tell you this. Next five to six years, the primary focus of major software and major distribution and major 3PL system is connectivity. We need to connect right from our supplier to the distributor to the customer seamlessly. This is where the focus is going to be, and I think Celonis Orchestration Engine will play central role in many companies, because it is fairly significantly easy to turn it on once you get the database correct and normalized.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a pretty magical thing to be able to say. When we think about business-wide software and platform solutions, we don't always get the term easy.

>> That's exactly right. So let me explain that at a very high level.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, please.

>> Let's take an example for the risk assessment of Celonis. Because first and foremost, you cannot automate a process that is not optimized and that is going to hurt it. So you only start the automation journey or you start the automation process once you're 100% sure that that order that you're automating is a good order. You're not hurting anybody by doing that. Celonis Execution App has a very easy to configure risk assessment, and these risks pop up real time, near real time. If you go over there and if you look at the Orchestration Engine itself-