How AstraZeneca Uses Celonis to Optimize Global Supply Chain Inventory

AstraZeneca’s global supply chain spans 26 manufacturing sites in 16 countries and relies on hundreds of suppliers to manufacture and distribute medicines at scale. The sheer complexity of coordinating API formulation, packing, and distribution across that network meant that even well-run processes carried significant blind spots — teams had limited real-time visibility into how inventory actually moved through the system versus how it was supposed to move.

Before expanding into supply chain, AstraZeneca’s Global Business Services (GBS) Process & Analytics Services team had already been using Celonis for finance use cases since 2017. Traditional inventory management relied on manual data collection and case-by-case process models, one per brand, that were difficult to scale and slow to surface cross-functional inefficiencies. Supply chain managers lacked the consistent, automated insight they needed to make faster decisions about stock levels, lead times, and distribution timing.

In partnership with its supply chain teams, AstraZeneca’s GBS team applied Celonis Process Mining to inventory management, initially using a case-centric approach for individual brands. When that proved valuable but limited in scalability, they adopted Celonis Object Centric Process Mining (OCPM) — a more advanced technique that allows multiple business objects to be analyzed simultaneously, with full upstream and downstream visibility across the entire process rather than siloed snapshots per brand.

The impact of OCPM was immediate and described by Tomasz Kacprowicz, Director and Global Process Mining CoE Lead, as “like moving from 2D to 3D.” Teams could now analyze different subprocesses holistically, understand how changes in one part of the chain affect another, and identify bottlenecks that were previously invisible. Inventory levels became optimized, reducing both cost and waste. Data collection that once required manual effort became automated and real-time. And medicines reached patients faster because distribution workflows were streamlined.

With the success of inventory management, AstraZeneca’s Process Mining Center of Excellence is now targeting an even larger ambition: cutting the company’s business processes in half. The team plans to extend OCPM to additional brands and apply the same approach across a wide range of key business processes throughout AstraZeneca, using the digital twin capability of process mining as the central lever for enterprise-wide transformation.