Digital Transformation & Business Process Management
Celonis process-mining of Heineken's Source-to-Pay, finding one root cause and redesigning the workflow around it.
The need
Heineken's invoice process for its Serbia operating company was slow and clogged with blocked invoices, sitting inside their EverGreen transformation. They needed to know why, with evidence, not opinion.
The challenge
The real cause was buried in the data: almost every case deviated from the standard, and the trap was to chase the symptoms. I had to help the team mine the actual process and isolate the one structural cause instead of patching dozens of effects.
What I made
Using Celonis process mining we found a single misconfigured flag that forced a rigid three-way match even on indirect services where no goods are ever received. I designed Intelligent Workflow Differentiation (split direct and indirect procurement into the right match) and a bi-modal IT solution: an S/4HANA configuration fix, an AI layer to scan invoices, and a generative-AI governance agent in Microsoft Teams.
The outcome
A root-cause-led redesign that fixed the structural problem and aligned to Heineken's own enterprise architecture, not just a local workaround.
Key points
- Diagnosed a near-total deviation rate with Celonis across tens of thousands of cases
- Isolated a single misconfigured flag as the dominant root cause of the delays
- Designed Intelligent Workflow Differentiation for direct vs indirect procurement
- Proposed a bi-modal IT solution aligned to the enterprise architecture