How Syngenta Uses Celonis to Prevent 4,200+ Production Stops and Unlock Cash

Syngenta operates at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and agriculture, developing crop protection products and seeds for farmers across more than 100 countries. The company’s scale is a competitive advantage, but it also generates operational complexity that compounds with growth: more countries, more subsidiaries, more systems, and more opportunities for data inconsistencies to cascade into production failures.

The specific problem was master data. Syngenta’s manufacturing operations depend on accurate, synchronized data fields across SAP systems — serialization numbers, material classifications, route configurations, and dozens of other attributes. When any single field was missing or incorrect, production runs had to be stopped, sometimes for hours and sometimes for days. With data scattered across systems, emails, and Excel sheets, the Master Data Management team had no efficient way to find the root cause of a data issue before it triggered a stop. As Cristina Destri, Digital Control Center and Insights Lead, put it: “Every production stop means losing time and money.”

Syngenta integrated Celonis’ process mining technology across its production and Order-to-Cash operations, supported by implementation partners Apolix and InfoSys. Celonis created a living digital twin of Syngenta’s end-to-end processes, connecting data from all major IT systems and surfacing exactly where data quality issues were forming — before they became production emergencies. Celonis Action Flows gave the MDM team automated alerts when master data fields were inaccurate or incomplete, drill-down visibility into which orders were affected, and recommended corrective actions that could be executed immediately. In Order-to-Cash, Celonis benchmarking identified which of Syngenta’s 40+ countries had the highest automation potential for order creation, invoicing, and delivery note generation, then helped teams drive down manual rework country by country.

The numbers tell the story clearly. In the first three months of production, the MDM team prevented over 2,100 production stops. By the ten-month mark, that figure had grown to more than 4,200. In Poland alone, the Order-to-Cash cycle time was cut by 148 days on average. Across the 24 countries where the OTC solution had been deployed, Syngenta eliminated 72,000 hours of manual rework. Combined with the 30,000 hours saved from MDM improvements, the platform has returned 102,000 hours to productive work, alongside millions in unlocked working capital from lower inventory buffers and faster cash collection.

Today Celonis is active across more than 20 processes at Syngenta, and the team is still early in what they see as a much larger opportunity. The platform has embedded a culture of continuous, data-driven improvement: employees have real-time visibility into process performance, can identify new efficiency opportunities themselves, and bring ideas for automation directly into the improvement cycle. For Destri, the ambition is expansive: “The possibilities with Celonis are infinite. Only imagination can hold us back.”