251|CELONIS – Process Mining

Challenges
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BYU Student Author: @Jason_Nguyen
Reviewers: @Michael_Barney, @James_Behling
Estimated Time to Solve: 20 Minutes

We provide the solution to this challenge using:

  • Celonis

Need a program? Click here.

Overview
You are a financial analyst at a mid-sized firm, Courgary, struggling with delayed payments from customers. Your boss has noticed increasing Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and wants a data-driven approach to find the bottlenecks in the process and improve the overall efficiency to reduce bad debt expense.

Your manager has provided event log data extracted from the company’s ERP system, and you need to use Celonis EMS to analyze and optimize the Invoice-to-Cash (I2C) process. Your task is to identify bottlenecks, rework loops, and deviations from the ideal process. You should make some suggestions to improve the I2C process.

Instructions

  1. Sign up for a Celonis account. Click here to register

  2. After signing up and completing the account set up process, log in to your account. Here is the log in link, just in case.

  3. As you finished logging in, this figure will show up. Please follow the instruction to reach to dashboard.

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  1. Under “Analyze an event log” section, upload the dataset by clicking the leftmost button, CSV/XLSX file

  2. Under “Map your data” section, allocate the “Case ID”, “Activities”, “Timestamp” to the corresponding columns.

  3. Go to “Process Discovery” in Celonis. Exploring options such as
    a. “What does your process look like?”
    b. “How long does your process take?”

  4. It will generate a Process Model (a flowchart of how invoices move through the system).

  5. Analyze the actual process vs. ideal process:
    a. Are there long delays between invoice approval and payment?
    b. Are there rework loops (e.g., invoices going back for re-approval)?
    c. What is the throughput time and target hit rate?
    d. Make some suggestions to tackle the bottleneck problem, if any

  6. Write two paragraphs summarizing your key analysis from the process discovery section and your suggestions to tackle any problems that you have found.

Data Files

Challenge251_CELONIS_DataSet.docx

Suggestions and Hints

Challenge251_CELONIS_Suggestions & Hints

Solution

Challenge251_CELONIS_solution.docx

Solution Video: Challenge 251|CELONIS_Solution video

Here is what your process should look like. Analyzing the data from the process.

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