Kimberly-Clark: Process Intelligence as Catalyst for Supply Chain and Global Business Services Transformation

Discovering process mining capability was a great fit for Kimberly-Clark’s circumstances. While seeking out back-office efficiency opportunities, we discovered that contrary to popular belief, teams only spent about 20% of their time in the source system, and the remaining was piecing together data and reports in search of insights. We had little to no business intelligence capabilities and lacked the skills and bandwidth to progress them forward. While we did have funding available to pursue solutions like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), we didn’t know where to start. Process mining provided a boost on all these fronts—helped us see how the processes worked and where analysts truly spent time, required us to connect our data together, and provided a platform for real time reporting and a means to not only determine where we could benefit from automation but also build those automations right in the platform with our business resources. Over time, two distinct CoEs were created: the first Supply Chain-specific business unit and closely following the Global Business Services function for all regions. Global Business Services were able to accelerate the creation of their CoE and adopt the approach, which naturally transitioned into a unified CoE partnership.