Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Celonis
Summarize
Summary of Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Celonis
The integration of ServiceNow Sourcing and Procurement Operations with Celonis enables organizations to identify inefficiencies in their procurement business processes, understand their impact, and gain actionable insights into root causes. This integration helps customers proactively address issues such as inconsistent payment terms, duplicate suppliers and invoices, late payment risks, and missing supplier bank account information, all of which can affect cash flow, overspending, and supplier relationships.
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Key Features
- Insight Detection: Celonis identifies critical procurement issues including mismatched payment terms, duplicate supplier records, duplicate invoices, payment holds due to price tolerances, and missing bank account details for electronic payments.
- Data Ingestion and Case Creation: Insights from Celonis are ingested via API into a custom staging table within ServiceNow, where cases and case lines are automatically created using business rules or flow designers.
- Playbook-Driven Workflows: Leveraging ServiceNow’s Process Automation Designer and Playbooks component, workflows guide users step-by-step through resolving issues using a low-code, intuitive interface.
- Configurable Case Management: Customers can assign cases to users or groups, configure closure actions such as ERP updates or supplier communications, and customize playbook content to include resolution steps, relevant data, search capabilities for knowledge articles, and embedded ERP update tasks.
- Automation and Integration: Playbooks enable end-to-end automation from case creation to resolution, including direct ERP updates without leaving the ServiceNow platform, improving efficiency and accuracy in procurement operations.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Identify and resolve procurement inefficiencies faster to optimize working capital and reduce days payable outstanding.
- Prevent financial risks such as duplicate payments and payment delays by addressing root causes early.
- Streamline supplier management by eliminating duplicate records and ensuring complete payment information.
- Enhance compliance and audit readiness through structured case management and documented resolution workflows.
- Improve supplier relationships with timely and accurate payments facilitated by proactive issue detection and resolution.
Implementation Considerations
To implement this integration, customers need to configure the ingestion of Celonis insights via API, set up appropriate case types and assignments within ServiceNow, and design playbooks tailored to their operational needs. The integration supports flexibility in handling cases, including the option to update ERP systems directly from the ServiceNow playbook interface or manually as preferred.
This integration also complements other ServiceNow Sourcing and Procurement Operations integrations such as IT Asset Management, Employee Center, third-party sourcing and risk management solutions, Project Management, Field Service Management, Contract Management, and procurement APIs.
Identify inefficiencies in your customer business process, understand their business impact, and gain insights into the root causes, by integrating Sourcing and Procurement Operations with Celonis.
- Inconsistent payment terms: Where the payment terms agreed with the supplier is Net 45 on the supplier primary record, but invoices have an earlier payment term like Net 15 or Net 30. Such inconsistent payment terms, if not recognized, may lead to an inefficient usage of the working capital and the days payable outstanding of the customer may get reduced.
- Duplicate suppliers: Where a same supplier is wrongly created twice, for example, “California Academy of Sciences” and “The California Academy of Sciences.” Such duplicate records may confuse end users, with some invoices getting created for the first supplier and some for the second. This makes supplier account reconciliation difficult and prone to frauds, where the same invoice may be recorded for both the suppliers.
- Duplicate invoices: Where the same supplier invoice gets recorded twice. This could be because it has been entered once based on the invoice that was emailed, and reentered by another payables specialist later when the physical copy of the invoice was received from the inward mail department. Such invoices, if not identified, may result in overbooking of an invoice and double payment to the supplier.
- Invoices for late payment risk: Where some invoices are on hold as the price billed is marginally greater than the tolerance defined, for example, 0.5% above tolerance. In such cases, the has to be released so that the payment can be made on time.
- Supplier bank account missing: Where the payment method setup on the supplier is electronic, but the bank account is missing. Payments for such suppliers are identified during the payment batch run that happens around the due date. This eventually delays the payment to the supplier and impacts the relationship with the supplier. Ideally, such issues must be identified beforehand so that the missing information can be gathered from the supplier well before the due date.
These insights are valuable and have a direct impact on business, in terms of inefficient usage of money, overspending, or having an adverse impact on supplier relationship. With this integration, these insights provided by Celonis are easily consumed by the Now platform’s intuitive low-code workflow to create playbook experiences that guide users through the processes on how to resolve these issues.
Workflow and playbook experience for Celonis integration
Workflows for the various insights provided by Celonis are built with the help of the Playbooks component provided by the Now platform. For more information on this component, see Process Automation Designer.
Here's an example of an inconsistent payment term insight provided by Celonis, and an end-to-end system built to automate the work for the users.
- Ingest the data from the Celonis API, create a procurement case, and assign it to a user or group. These cases are displayed in the assigned user's Source-to-Pay Workspace landing page.
- Customers can configure various options like updating the ERP directly from the case playbook, or manually logging in to the ERP to update the data.
- Customers can configure the closure steps like sending an email to the supplier with the information that the payment terms have been updated to the original agreed term recorded in the primary record. Customers can also mark a copy of this email to their manager with the case closure information.
- Steps to resolve the case.
- Displaying the relevant information in the playbook so that users can take appropriate decisions.
- Ability to perform searches so that the case owner can search for knowledge articles on similar cases and learn how they were resolved.
- Embedded tasks in the playbook like directly updating the ERP, which ensures that all the work that must be done can be done from the playbook itself without the need to log in to any other ERP system.
Celonis triggers for Sourcing and Procurement Operations
{
"Supplier": "PolyTec",
"Supplier City": "Munich",
"Supplier Country": "DE",
"Purchase Order": "PO10008760",
"Invoice Number": 9350035113,
"Payment Block Reason": "Payment Term Mismatch",
"Due Date": "5/15/21",
"Priority Vendor": "Yes",
"Invoice Amount": 160725.03,
"Payment Term (Invoice)": "NET 30",
"Payment Term (Master Data)": "NET 60"
}
The incoming payload from Celonis is stored in a custom staging table, from where it is processed via a business rule or flow designer to create a case and corresponding case lines. You can leverage existing case types or create a new case type as need be, which you can then assign to users or groups. Create a new case type by adding a new choice to the Case type column. A corresponding playbook can be triggered for this case type to assist in case fulfilment, as explained above.