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Celonis: Tracking emissions across the supply chain to deliver Net Zero

Celonis: tracking emissions across the supply chain to deliver Net Zero

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Celonis: tracking emissions across the supply chain to deliver Net Zero

An interview with Janina Nakladal, global director of sustainability

Celonis is a cloud-based business process management (BPM) software supplier with around 1,800 employees, based in Munich and New York. As the need for more sustainable businesses processes becomes clear, the company has been looking into reducing waste and emissions in manufacturing, purchasing, inventory management and logistics.

We caught up with Janina Nakladal, global director of sustainability, to find out more.

Computing: Overall, how is Celonis addressing sustainability? What's the big picture?

Janina Nakladal: Sustainability is in general the greatest challenge, and also the greatest execution challenge, of our time.

Celonis is committed to a Net Zero trajectory for our carbon footprint. On top of this, we expect to help 10,000 other companies become Net Zero in the next ten years.

Central to this is our platform, which was created to optimise business processes, making them as efficient, and therefore as sustainable, as possible.

We do this internally at Celonis and we also heavily invest in new customer use-cases and innovation to, for example, make supply chains traceable, to ensure more sustainable spend, to decarbonise processes and to add social value. Ultimately, we are all on a Net Zero journey.

Is there a formal policy and how is accountability assigned?

As global director of sustainability, my team and I report directly into the CEO and work with the entire C-level, across all departments, ensuring full accountability. Ultimately, we see this as a C-level topic, because without buy-in from senior leadership, nothing will change. We also educate and engage our employees, known as ‘Celonauts', to empower action from the bottom up.

For the first time this year, we are producing a sustainability report for Celonis, across all departments, including ambitious goal-setting and tracking of our progress to-date.

Does your strategy cover climate change and energy consumption, circular electronics (reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing), recycling and waste management, as well as supply chain impacts?

Yes - all these things are covered in our sustainability strategy.

From an internal perspective, we measure our ongoing impact, set clear targets to improve against, and create policies to action projects forward. Examples include carbon accounting across the organisation, optimising energy consumption in our data centres, ensuring circular IT devices for employees, incentivising sustainable suppliers or improving waste management in our offices, but also social impact. The latter covers a diverse, inclusive and equitable employee experience or programs to champion access to education.

We do this by analysing and improving our processes internally, within our own teams, and externally, with our customers and partners, to show how our Execution Management System can foster greater sustainability. This includes tracking CO2 emissions across the supply chain, for example in logistics and procurement, incorporating supplier ratings, for example from EcoVadis, in procurement process decisions, and identifying waste and resource consumption in processes like inventory and production.

More specifically, what have Celonis' products done to become a more sustainable product? What design changes have been adopted in the last 5 years to ensure it is a more sustainable one?

Our software runs on green data centres, and the providers we work with ensure our data centres leverage renewable energy. We also contribute to the development of advanced models to calculate the carbon footprint from data centres to improve accountability.

Improving our technology itself helps in many ways, big and small. Running more efficient calculations or reducing the number of data loads, for example, leads to time and energy consumption savings.

What percentage of the energy used in Celonis data centres comes from renewable sources? How is this sourced?

Globally, we are close to 100 per cent. Celonis data centres run entirely on renewable sources and while our external data centres, including those of customers and partners, are going green, we continually push them to be more so.

All of our internal information technology runs on completely renewable energy.

Our carbon footprint accounting includes calculating the lifetime footprint of data centres based on spend, materials, energy grid, location and more. Additionally, we even account for emissions caused by the software usage of our customers.

How important is sustainability to Celonis customers? Is it something many ask about in the pre-sales phase?

Our analysis shows that 100 per cent of customers cover sustainability in their strategy! So it is very important, and even beyond our customers, almost every company now has some sort of carbon commitment and sustainability goals.

As customers recognise that sustainability is a strategic value driver, we support them by demonstrating how business processes are critical levers to achieve set targets. As processes determine how businesses run, they enable operational and even systemic change. Once business processes are analysed and improved with intelligence and data execution, it becomes possible to prioritise sustainability in every operational decision.

We are seeing increasing demand in solutions to tackle the various challenges customers face with regards to sustainability. They come to us asking about data availability and connection, operationalisation and monitoring of targets, and holistic reporting.

Our customers are also eager to understand the end-to-end supply chain and collaborate with their suppliers and customers to achieve more sustainable business operations. This is reflected in requested use cases, the innovative questions our customers ask, and requests for Celonis to join our customers' efforts as a supplier.

We see massive demand for innovation, collaboration and technological solutions, and the ability to leverage data, driven by global awareness, legal regulations and scientific reports.

What sustainability drives or changes are planned for Celonis' product line over the next year?

Our primary innovation focus, where we think we can have the greatest impact, is on embedding sustainability KPIs into every customer process, to help them set and adhere to their own goals. Carbon footprint and other sustainability KPIs need to become a currency. This will ensure organisations are not only focused on business outcomes such as cost optimisation or on-time delivery rates when assessing performance, but are also viewing sustainability on a level-playing field with traditional financial goals.

A good example of this is our new Execution Graph which helps companies to very simply and quickly connect processes, and see how single elements connect to the whole organisation.

A report produced this year by the World Economic Forum (WEF) shows that eight global supply chains account for more than 50 per cent of all carbon emissions. According to the EPA, supply chain - or Scope 3 - emissions "often represent the majority of an organisation's total [greenhouse gas] emissions." This includes procured products, transport of products, usage of sold products, product disposal and more. This means that fundamentally, having your own sustainable processes is not enough - your supply chain must also be sustainable, including your suppliers.

WEF further estimates that Net Zero supply chains would hardly increase end-consumer costs, and that around 40 per cent of all supply chain emissions can be tackled with readily available and affordable measures, such as process efficiency.

Solving this issue is our focus. We work towards connecting the supply chain, end-to-end, and across companies to create crucial execution networks and traceability across products, services and processes.

Which issue would you most like your existing and prospective customers to know about your organisation's sustainability efforts?

Ultimately, it's about your mindset. Action needs to follow statements - saying "sustainability is the most important challenge of our time and requires immediate action" is all very well, but in the majority of cases, as a society we are not executing on this action at maximum capacity.

Progress has been challenging because sustainability is complex and organisations are trying to improve interconnected, interdependent processes that are challenging to understand, let alone change. Currently, most companies do not have the tools they need to make the change they need, but Celonis can help.

The changes we all need to make are systemic and operational.

Systemic is the bigger challenge - to convince every organisation, and hopefully society as a whole, to turn towards sustainable business models and culture. At Celonis, everything we do supports our mission to walk the talk and invest in a Net Zero culture -- that lives and breathes sustainable innovation, for ourselves and our customers and partners.

Operational change is perhaps slightly easier. At Celonis, we are always working towards better integrating sustainability into key operations and day-to-day decision-making.

We need our customers and partners to understand that it is processes that determine how businesses run. Process inefficiencies create waste, increase unnecessary emissions, cause compliance issues, and more. We need data-powered process transparency to mitigate these impacts, and to transform processes and achieve sustainable business execution.

At Celonis, we have the expertise and motivation to do this, and if we can solve the operational problem today, we can collectively work towards the systemic problem.

Issues around sustainability and partnership will be discussed in Computing 's Tech Impact Conference, coming in 2022.

Celonis: Tracking emissions across the supply chain to deliver Net Zero

An interview with Janina Nakladal, global director of sustainability

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