How Hexion Uses Celonis Process Intelligence to Reduce Supply Chain Disruption and Improve Working Capital

Hexion manufactures specialty chemicals and performance materials for over 1,200 companies across 60 countries, with more than 30 manufacturing and R&D facilities worldwide. When COVID-19 hit, the company faced simultaneous pressures: logistics disruptions, material shortages, and reliability issues across its global supply chain. The underlying problem was visibility — with complex, fragmented systems across multiple locations, Hexion's teams struggled to identify pain points in a data-driven way. They couldn't systematically understand which customers were driving order changes or quantify how those changes rippled through Production Planning and Procurement.

The result was reactive firefighting. Supply chain teams were responding to problems as they emerged rather than anticipating and preventing them. Without a connected view of the Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, and production processes, there was no way to surface the root causes of disruption or measure the full impact of operational deviations.

Hexion implemented the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform to connect its dissimilar IT systems and create continuous monitoring across five core processes: Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Production Planning. Celonis Action Flows enabled intelligent automation to intervene in routine deviations. The first analysis revealed 10,000 previously unknown variants in the Order-to-Cash process alone — a quantification of the complexity the team had been managing without visibility.

The financial results are concrete. Supplier financing days to pay dropped by 50%, freeing up several million dollars in working capital. Unearned cash discounts declined 50%. Route changes from production to customer fell 45%. Credit hold release to shipment improved by six days — from 11 days to 5. Each metric reflects a specific process improvement that Celonis made visible and actionable.

For Hexion, the platform has shifted the operating model from reactive firefighting to proactive, data-driven decision-making — giving supply chain and finance leaders a live sounding board for understanding operations and acting quickly.