How PepsiCo Uses Celonis to Cut Order Rejections 86% and Unlock Millions in Cash

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.