Breaking the chains with manual work reduction

For the American multinational food and beverage company, finance operations were stuck in a cycle of manual, repetitive tasks. In 2025, thousands of hours were lost due to offline planning reports, manual approvals and validations, and manual trackers and processing of promotional checks. There was no visibility into these exceptions or into the extent of time and effort involved.

A suboptimal use of existing tools, heavy reliance on spreadsheets for tracking and reporting, inefficient exception handling, and limited visibility led to low employee productivity and operational efficiency. Also, opportunities to reduce manual work were hidden in plain sight.

We teamed up with the client to help them cut through the chaos. Using Celonis task mining, we analyzed six core processes in finance operations – procure to pay, order management, invoice to cash, supply chain management, master data, and the trade center of excellence. By capturing user-level activity data from more than 600 users, we uncovered the real story behind the numbers.

Here's what we found:

• Over 5,600 hours spent each year on offline planning reports

• 3,800 hours spent in maintaining manual trackers for promotional checks

• 2,100 hours spent resolving exceptions

• Hundreds of hours lost to manual invoice validation, email approvals, and claims processing

   

It was clear that automation and smarter workflows could unlock significant operational efficiency and transform how work gets done.

Celonis task mining and process analytics generated 58 critical insights, leading to 27 targeted improvement opportunities. We captured and analyzed agents' logged-in time across applications (productive and unproductive) and pinpointed areas ripe for automation. Here's how we made it happen:

• Spotting automation wins: By tracking copy-paste behaviors and exception handling, we identified where automation could have the biggest impact

• Optimizing application usage: We classified apps as productive or nonproductive and identified opportunities to shift time to productive apps. Analysis of the most- and least-used apps helped assess employee productivity and user base rationalization, as well as identify opportunities to optimize software license costs

• Standardizing and automating processes: Process and variant explorers highlighted non-value-added activities to standardize and enable automation for higher operational efficiency

• Improving capacity planning: User time-threshold analysis revealed opportunities for better workload distribution, schedule adherence, and employee productivity

   

A new dashboard delivered end-to-end visibility, empowering teams to monitor progress, have better control over schedule adherence and application usage, and improve employee experience.