To learn how Zespri achieved this impressive outcome, please watch my virtual fireside chat with Pascal Coubard, the APAC Sales Leader at Celonis, and Dave Scullin, the Chief Digital Officer at Zespri, please read on below!

Celonis is a global leader in Process Mining and Process Intelligence, and Zespri, which is very recognisably the world’s leading marketer of kiwifruit, have highlighted the significant success of their efforts to optimise business operations, improve working capital and deliver millions in value realised.

How did Zespri do this, and how did Celonis tech help make it happen? Here’s our fireside-style chat, after which the article continues, please watch and read on!

“When we started to analyse our data in the Celonis Process Intelligence platform, we saw the immediate opportunity to improve our procurement and purchase-to-pay processes. Celonis has been instrumental in enhancing our processes at Zespri helping us to drive better outcomes for our people and our customers, and more value for our growers,” said Dave Scullin, Chief Digital Officer of Zespri.

Zespri is 100% owned by current and former kiwifruit growers, working with 2,800 growers in New Zealand and 1,500 growers offshore managing one-third of the global kiwifruit volume across 59 countries. In 2024, it expects to export a record 190 million trays of fruit. In 2023/24, Zespri generated annual global operating revenue of $NZ4.2 billion.

“Zespri is a New Zealand success story, and Celonis is proud that our market-leading Process Intelligence platform is enabling the company to drive positive change, deliver millions in value and billions of nutritious kiwifruit around the world,” said Pascal Coubard, VP of APAC at Celonis.

Changemakers: Driving transformation, delivering tangible value

In 2020, Zespri embarked on Project Horizon, an ambitious multiple-year effort to transform the company’s processes and systems—some of which were 20 years old. As part of this modernisation program, it began working with Celonis and TEC150, one of Celonis’ regional partners, in 2022. The initial focus was in Purchase-to-Pay and Order Management.

Using the Celonis Process Intelligence platform, which leverages the latest process mining technology and AI, Zespri was able to increase productivity, reduce duplicate invoices and clear credit memos quicker. In the 18 months since the collaboration started, the team was able to achieve:

  • Reduction to its Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) cycle time by 27%: Given the volume of fruit Zespri ships annually, slow payments can have a significant impact on the Purchase-to-Pay process. Leveraging Celonis for VIM, the company was able to reduce cycle times by 27%.
  • Purchase Order conformance increased from 65% to 88% in 12 months: Purchases without POs cause significant manual work, require additional approvals and reduce payment times. As part of Project Horizon, Zespri started to use Celonis to continuously monitor the non-PO rate across the organisation. When PO usage dropped, market finance managers were sent email alerts (through Celonis Action Flow automations) with a clear call to action, enabling the teams to adopt new ways to proactively increase PO conformance.
  • Credit Memo clearance improved by 68 days in 2024: Credit memos that are not cleared against open invoices impact working capital and carry the risk of being written off. The team deployed the Celonis Open Credit Memo App and began weekly monitoring of credit memos, which enabled quick matching to invoices and the avoidance of writing off old credit memos.
  • Identified and prevented potential duplicate spend: Zespri used the Celonis Duplicate Invoice Checker App to proactively prevent duplicate payments and assist in accelerated recovery to avoid a negative impact on working capital. Fuzzy matching was used to identify duplicates that were similar but not equal, and regular weekly checks by Account Payable teams prevented payouts.

Looking to the future: Optimising Zespri’s Supply Chain and supporting SAP ECC to S/4HANA migration

Building on Zespri’s success with Celonis and TEC150 in their core Finance functions, the team plans to expand its use of the platform to further support Project Horizon. Within the next year, it will begin using Celonis as part of the organisation’s migration of its supply chain processes from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. Celonis will enable Zespri to measure the performance of processes running in the existing ECC environment (the as-is state) to its performance in S/4HANA (the to-be state). Monitoring the delta between the “before” and “after” states as processes are migrated will be key to ensuring the migration is delivering optimal performance gains and Zespri is achieving its supply chain resilience goals.

“We are looking forward to growing Celonis’ adoption across the organisation,” said Richard Matthews, Business Process Analyst and Celonis Centre of Excellence Lead at Zespri. “When I show people how easy Celonis is to use and how powerful it is, I see them reach that ‘aha moment’.  It’s that moment in time when they first realise the objective visualisation of their processes and the opportunities for optimising their processes is now in their hands.

“Zespri has a culture of data-driven decision making, and our users are familiar with traditional business intelligence tools. But with Celonis, they can do more than just see a snapshot of our data at one point in time. They can quickly and easily filter and drill down on a living digital twin of our processes and get insights into how the business actually runs.  I see the excitement in them knowing they are playing an important role in improving our business processes.”

For more, please watch the video interview above!