Celosphere 2024 | Kuldeep Dudeja, Reckitt

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Kuldeep Dudeja

IT & Digital Director - Mergers & Acquisitions & Global Hub

Reckitt

Three insights you might have missed from Celosphere24

As enterprises navigate the rapid shift toward AI-driven business solutions, enterprise process intelligence has become essential for cohesive data integration. Process intelligence is increasingly recognized as a key enabler in optimizing complex workflows and unifying data systems across industries, supporting a more connected and efficient operational landscape.Celonis SE’s evolving capabilities reflect the industry-wide emphasis on actionable data insights and operational transparency

Driving operational excellence: Reckitt’s journey with process intelligence

As organizations grow increasingly dependent on data-driven insights to drive efficiencies, harnessing vast streams of information through process intelligence has become essential for maintaining a competitive edge.This approach requires not just advanced technology, but a nuanced understanding of the role data plays in shaping operations, informing strategy and, ultimately, achieving success.“We’ve been able to drive network and capital improvements a lot,” said Kuldeep Dudeja (pictured), IT and digital director of intelligent automation and process mining at Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC. “That has been our great success story at Reckitt

play_circle_outline Introduction to Reckitt, a CPG company with iconic brands like Lysol and Dettol.

play_circle_outline Integration of Celonis for process optimization and intelligence across the enterprise.

play_circle_outline Overcoming employee resistance through change management and data-driven approach.

play_circle_outline Enhancing Efficiency Through Centralized Processes and Process Mining in Contemporary Business Operations

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Kuldeep Dudeja, Reckitt

Kuldeep Dudeja

IT & Digital Director - Mergers & Acquisitions & Global Hub Reckitt

In Munich, Germany, at Celonis Celosphere, Savannah Peterson and Rob Streche interviewed Kuldeep from Reckitt, a company with iconic brands like Lysol and Dettol. Kuldeep discussed implementing Celonis for process optimization. They have seen improvements in network and capital, cost to serve, and CO2 reduction, resulting in triple-digit million benefits. Employee happiness has increased despite initial resistance to change. Collaboration and data sharing with suppliers and customers have been successful. This has led to better customer experiences, ensuring ... Read more

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What company does Kuldeep work for and what products do they manufacture? add

What led to the decision to expand the use of Celonis beyond finance and compliance processes and across the entire enterprise? add

What strategies were implemented to overcome resistance to change and drive adoption of process mining technology in a traditional company with a long-standing heritage? add

What strategies is Reckitt currently implementing in terms of process orientation and centralization? add

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Kuldeep Dudeja, Reckitt

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, process optimizers, and welcome back to Munich, Germany. We are here, halfway through day two of Celonis Celosphere. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by Rob Streche. We are just rocking the morning. I guess we're already into the afternoon now.

>> Yeah, it's been great. I think the energy has been fantastic. The conversations continue to really drive around why process optimization is just so key and why you can't really do it without process intelligence as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and speaking of intelligence, we have had so many intelligent guests, and we've got one sitting here with us right now. Kuldeep, thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with us.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Thank you so much for calling me here.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, no, it's our pleasure to get to learn from you. You are at Reckitt, and my understanding is people may not know of Reckitt, but they certainly know of your many products. So tell us what you all do.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> So first of all about Reckitt, we are 200 old year heritage working in the CPG industry, works in three different categories, health, hygiene, and home, and nutrition. So we've been owner, proud owner of our iconic brands like Lysol, Dettol, Durex, Nurofen, Mucinex, you name it, and it's all over.

Savannah Peterson

>> Literally every person in here has your products either in their bag or on their shelves at home.

>> I was going to say Mucinex is one of my favorite things. I have it in my bag when I travel all the time.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is a lifesaver for us.

>> It is, it is a lifesaver.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's definitely in these times. You've also got 40,000 people all over the world working with y'all. What's your role specifically at Reckitt?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> So I take care of the intelligent automation for the group, which means globally how we drive the efficiency and effectiveness across the processes. That's my role for Reckitt. I've been with them for the last 14 years.

>> So how did you get started with Celonis and what process did you really focus in on? Because I think again, CPG, so many brands, there are so many places you could have started with this and doing the process mining and getting process management and process intelligence.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Yeah. We have a long history with Celonis. I think it has evolved over time, and so has the product, and so has the intelligence behind it, to be honest. When we started was long back. We started with our internal control prospect where we wanted to know what's happening. We were blinded. Of course the systems, we had, but how you look at it at a consistent level, at a process level, we introduced Celonis there on that, looking at our finance and compliance processes perspective. But soon, we realized that it is beyond that. It's just not about the visibility, but we could create a lot of value behind the intelligence which it brings. With time, around there years ago, we realized that yes, that's where we really need to up the game, not look at it from one function perspective, but we can bring it across the enterprise. So we changed our agreements with Celonis to drive it across end to end. So today, we use Celonis, you name it, whether it is procurement, finance, order to cash, supply chain, sustainability, internal controls, external controls. You just want it to be everywhere.

Savannah Peterson

>> Completely. When you talk about taking the platform completely across the organization, that's really impressive, and I know that's music to Alex's ears and to the whole team here. What are some of the benefits and ROI that you've been able to realize from the impact of implementing this tool so broadly?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> As you can imagine, ROI is great, because I will start with the benefit first, and then we'll move to ROI. We've been able to drive network and capital improvements a lot. That had been our great success story at Reckitt. Not just that, but we were able to even drive our cost to serve, which is helping us to drive our P&L benefits on the books. Beyond that, we have also been able to drive our CO2 emission reduction. So those, all three of them, which is a part of our value, beyond that, which is what we are not able to measure, but it's more softer aspect is having the customer experience is better and also that's why experience is better. So that's great. On the ROI side, I think from where we are today, we already announced that we are in a triple digits of a million of benefit realized. We are on the journey of that and we are almost there.

Savannah Peterson

>> Triple digit millions, just to put that in bold for a second. That's impressive.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> We have boldly talked about it and we are in the journey and we are progressing well towards it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Exciting.

>> Sorry.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, yeah, go for it, Rob.

>> I got pretty excited there, talking about good old savings all day. What are some of the key KPIs that you look at and are measuring the success that people who maybe are not as far down the path and haven't been with Celonis for as long, you think should be looking at?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> So at top level, we look at the value KPI. We just talked about that, how each of those operation KPIs can either lead to your bottom line or top line or a green line, now we call it, because for satisfaction implies satisfaction. But underneath, there are many depending on where you work on. If it is supply, can we deliver products on time in full to them? Yeah, if it is finance, can you make sure that how much invoice can be If it is around procurement, can we make sure that there are least amounts of payments terms in our favor? The best net is in our favor and we can drive the process down to improvement. If it is anything to do with CO2, we can reduce our carbon footprint. So we have different KPIs that manage to drive the top line.

Savannah Peterson

>> You mentioned this when you were talking about all the positive impact at the top and across at the company, but I'm curious because sometimes when people are doing process optimization, it can make employees a little uneasy, because everything they're doing and all of the actions they're taking are being looked at and evaluated. You mentioned that employee happiness has gone up since you started doing this. What is the culture around the tool internally? And how have you managed to get trust and buy in in that transparency?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> It was not easy, I can tell. That was the difficult part.

Savannah Peterson

>> Folks can learn a lot from you on this.

>> The technology is easy, but easier than the people aspect.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Not easy, I can tell you. It's the tip of the iceberg. Technology is different, yes, but really stories goes behind it. 80% of the effort goes in change management. As I told you, at a 200 years old company, we have a heritage. I know people, those who are in Reckitt for higher their age in Reckitt is higher than my own age. You can imagine, not that I'm too young, but just to let you know.

Savannah Peterson

>> You're timeless.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Yes, time-wise. They are resistant to change because they have done things over and over again because it is in standard fashion. When this brings up that you want to change the way you want to work tomorrow, there is always a resistance. I think what has been helpful is from a technology that's so powerful, because it's data driven, everything is a fact. Everything is what you actually have done. You can go to the lowest level of detail to prove that this could be done better. I think it was voluntary. What has helped us is we really found our friends first. Who's ready to believe in it? We had our first pilot, what I call lighthouse success stories, and we used that as a lighthouse use case to drive and make sure that if you believe in the process mining and process intelligence, it think that's it.

>> It would seem again, being a CPG company, there's supply chain on both sides, raw materials in, finished product out. That's just massive. It would seem like the things they're announcing with network and other things would be very advantageous potentially in the future for what you're doing. What do you see as the things that really have helped you move along, especially as maybe you've helped data with them or you've been a design partner? What are those types of things that you see?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> So just to give you a scale, we sell 30 million products on a daily basis. So you can imagine the scale we have to work on.

Savannah Peterson

>> 30 billion?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Million.

Savannah Peterson

>> Million, oh. I thought, whoa.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> No, no.

>> It's still a lot.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a lot, very impressive.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> We touch a lot, many consumers on a daily basis. Over the period, I think we touched almost a great amount of people in billions. So it means a lot of transactions. It means a lot of way we have to make sure our customers are happy and our vendors are happy. So what you talked about, I think it started our journey on that around a year ago, how we can collaborate and co-share the data so that what is a challenge internally is also a challenge for our customers and the suppliers. So could we do something which can be a win-win situation? Because nobody wants to fine us if we are delivering late, right? Because that's not what That's not about making or to find it. They are really making money out of selling. So we really embark our journey, how would we be able to work more collaboratively, share the data, integrate the challenges, and drive for success internally along with that?

Savannah Peterson

>> I'm curious form a consumer side, so I'm milling around looking for one of the many products, one of the 30 million things you're selling every single day. How has this transformation made that customer experience better?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Yeah, so I think having the right product at the right time is the key, right? So you can imagine we are in the two biggest demands, very demanding category. One is the Lysol and Dettol, which was very popular during COVID time. And second was very recently about our meal powder for the babies. So they were both in shortages at the peak of the time. If we were able to make sure our product is on the shelf for exactly the right they want, to make sure that they can pick up at the arm's length is what we would make our customer happy for. We have built our brands and built trust in our brands. They don't want to use different brands. So you just want to make sure that our product sat on the shelf. They are picking it up. And they are utilizing the benefit and they can make themselves more healthier, better, and more hygienic.

>> Where do you see this fitting, because you are so far down the path with Celonis than the process intelligence? Where do you AI fitting in into this picture?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Well, you might have been seeing in the keynote, the AI is not as effective as there is not PI. There is no AI without PI has been a mantra. Fortunately, I just spoke about it, how we make a difference to AI in my just keynote for right now a few minutes ago. So we're using that AI within Celonis to drive a lot of capabilities around our many use cases around procurement, manufacturing, to make sure that we can drive low down time for our factories. We can use to make sure that we can negotiate better on our payment terms or we have less price leakages. So we've been very glad to be working on AI as fine a year before on PI and helped us a lot in actually what we want to achieve today.

>> Are you using the Celonis Copilot or are you building your own? How are you looking at AI in that way?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> So if you look at it, AI can play in three different categories, a role. One is you can do a conversation with AI, which is a Copilot piece of it. The second is you can use AI to define the unstructured data to make it much more meaningful. And the third one, you can use AI as an agent who will take a decision on your behalf. So I think they come in their increasing complexity. So we started with our conversational AI. We live a bit more on the Copilot which we have already had some small pocket of success for. I will not say that we had a huge success on that area, because more of us are getting trained and we want to make sure that everybody is confident. But it's definitely helping our community to be more interacting with PI very quickly. So that's one. But also, we have done some experimentation around the unstructured data as well as the decision making AI.

>> That's great. That's great, and I think what do you see as what you want to tackle next from a process perspective? What's on your radar as you're going home from here? I'm excited to get into this.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> Well, Reckitt is in a very trusting, pivotal point where they've announced that strategy piece. They would like to keep themselves very process oriented. So we are heading towards the strategy of having end to end processes more centralized, more simplified, and more leaner, which could not be achieved with process mining. So definitely, we are embarking our journey to the next level. With what we have done recently is that we have also implemented their process modeling, which is what they call famously CPM it's not more for BPM, but they call it CPM. So what we are very excited about is how process mining and CPM can come play together to define what is to be processed and what is as is and how we can remove the gaps between that.

>> That's great.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it's exciting, so many opportunities and so many SKUs. My mind has just been thinking about all the different ways in which we can surprise and delight and save time and save money, save waste, be more sustainable, make sure things aren't getting thrown because they're past their shelf date, oodles of things. Kuldeep, this has been so exciting. I have one last question to you. When we have the pleasure of having you on the show again next year at Celosphere, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> I think if we could make our life much more simpler, much more synonymous in terms of driving the person's excellence and to the business excellence, to the shareholder excellence, if I can quantify that in some value, that would be what I would be aspiring for.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we look forward to hearing you quantify that on the main stage in the keynote with the great example of how you're making and helping people live healthier, cleaner, and happier lives, which I know is your mission statement. Kuldeep, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Kuldeep Dudeja

>> It was great pleasure for me being here. Thank you so much.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely, and Rob, what a morning we have had.

>> It's been exciting.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's been exciting.

>> There's been a lot of really great information.

Savannah Peterson

>> So much, I know. I feel smarter. I was almost intimidated by the brainpower on this desk, and I don't say that lightly. I'm very excited to hear what your favorite segment from this morning has been, wherever you may be watching. We're here in Munich, Germany at Celonis Celosphere. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching TheCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.