How PepsiCo Uses Celonis to Cut Order Rejections 86% and Unlock Millions in Cash
PepsiCo deployed Celonis process mining across its Global Process Excellence organization to expose root-cause inefficiencies in accounts receivable, accounts payable, and order-to-cash workflows. The platform reduced sales order rejections by 86%, saved over 1,000 hours annually in AP, and unlocked millions in free cash flow by enabling teams to act on real-time process intelligence.
Impact
86%
Sales order rejection rate reduction
1,000+
AP hours saved annually
Millions
Free cash flow unlocked
Millions
Write-offs reduced
Challenge
PepsiCo lacked end-to-end process visibility across accounts receivable, payable, and order-to-cash workflows, with sales order rejections running at 30% and millions in cash flow trapped in unoptimized processes.
Solution
Deployed Celonis process mining integrated with SAP S/4HANA to reconstruct real-time process flows, automatically surface prioritized actions, detect invoice control bypass attempts, and trace root causes of order rejections.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Celonis is the genie in a bottle we've all been waiting for to make our wishes come true.”
“The working capital impact that Celonis has had — in the range of millions — is astonishing.”
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Full Story
PepsiCo's Global Process Excellence (GPEX) team was created to lead digital transformation across one of the world's largest food and beverage companies. With thousands of SKUs, complex multi-region supply chains, and high volumes of financial transactions, the challenge was identifying where process breakdowns were silently destroying value — cash stuck in overdue receivables, sales orders rejected at high rates, invoices routed around approval controls.
The core problem was visibility. Individual teams understood their slice of a process but lacked the end-to-end transparency needed to diagnose systemic failures. Finance teams couldn't quickly identify which overdue invoices to prioritize; procurement teams couldn't easily detect split invoices circumventing approval thresholds; operations teams couldn't trace why orders were being rejected at a 30% rate before root causes were identified.
PepsiCo deployed Celonis across multiple end-to-end processes, integrating with SAP S/4HANA to ingest event data and reconstruct process flows in real time. In accounts receivable, Celonis surfaces prioritized dunning queues and flags high-value overdue invoices for global teams. In accounts payable, Action Flows automatically detect split invoices that circumvent approval limits. In order-to-cash, process mining traced the root causes of rejections — credit limits, cancellations, system issues, and inventory stockouts — enabling targeted remediation that brought the rejection rate from 30% to 4%.
The financial impact was substantial across every process. Accounts receivable improvements unlocked millions in free cash flow through better DSO prioritization. AP automation saved over 1,000 hours annually by eliminating manual invoice reviews. Write-off reductions in make-to-deploy processes saved millions more through real-time spare parts visibility and intelligent recommendations. GPEX transitioned from a cost center to a recognized strategic value partner, hiring roughly one new Celonis implementation specialist per quarter to keep up with internal demand.
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