Risi snacks and appetizers are Spanish favorites. As part of its ambitious innovation and digitalization process for transformation, Fujitsu has introduced the company to the value of process mining to help Risi make better decisions and boost its efficiency and competitiveness.
Challenge
Risi has been one of Spain’s favorite choices for appetizers and snacks. The company was looking for new solutions and technologies to accelerate its digitalization process and improve customer service.
Solution
Risi demonstrated the added value of process mining in improving organizational processes by analyzing and identifying inef ficiencies in the order preparation process.
Outcomes
- Ability to identify process behaviors and critical inefficiencies
- Understanding the impacts on order preparation and delivery times
- Utilizing the potential of process mining as a tool
Fujitsu has introduced us to process mining and opened our eyes to its enormous potential to improve our business.
Javier Paniagua, CIO, Risi
Transparency
into order picking, combining expert knowledge and data
- Industry: Manufacturing
- Location: Spain
- Customer's website
About the client
Founded in 1971, Risi is a Spanish family-owned business that specializes in the production of snacks and appetizers. Headquartered in Madrid and a workforce of over 350 across four sites, Risi produces around 250 million packs of snacks in over 60 formats, all bearing its iconic branding. The company recently diversified its activities through the acquisition of biscuit and confectionery brands.
Driving the digital transformation
Since its creation in 1971, leading Spanish snack brand Risi has invested heavily in three areas: sustainability, by incorporating renewable energy into its production processes; production, with the acquisition of new machinery to double production capacity; and system modernization, with the implementation of a digitalization and automation strategy to streamline order management and billing, and make the business more efficient.
As part of its digital transformation, Risi has paid close attention to new ideas and solutions with the potential to drive organizational change, allowing it to stand out from the competition through innovation and workplace excellence.
“In recent months, we have embarked on projects that entail fundamental change,” explains Javier Paniagua, CIO at Risi. “In 2020, we changed our enterprise resource planning (ERP) and everything related to the transactional system. Throughout 2021, we worked on manufacturing projects, including quality, production, procurement, and maintenance. We had heard of process mining but didn’t fully understand what it meant for us. When we were approached by Fujitsu, we were so interested that we invited them to look at one of the challenges we faced in our order preparation process to help us understand process mining and how it could benefit us."
Improving business processes
A key objective for Risi was to demonstrate the potential value of process mining for initiatives to improve organizational processes, particularly order management and processing times.
Business processes are at the heart of Risi’s organization, and in an increasingly agile and digital corporate environment, Risi needs to be able to build them quickly. The processes also need to be easy to operate and quick to change. Fujitsu’s primary value proposition lies in its wide range of services, such as process mining, which uses data to help ensure the overall operational efficiency of business processes.
As a prime example, the process from receiving an order to delivery logistics was partly dependent on the efficiency of Risi’s picking function. Here, workloads, preparation times, and the units into which orders are consolidated – such as pallets or boxes – are key factors. All these impact logistics costs for resources, transport planning, and service level agreements with customers.
Fujitsu partnered with Celonis, a leader in the application of process mining, and used its platform to address the challenge. It analyzed the digital footprint of the order picking process, based on existing SAP ERP data over a specific time frame.
Full visibility for improving processes
Process mining tools are at the heart of many companies’ attempts to discover the underlying reality of processes, and then optimize them. They effectively create an ‘x-ray’ to give full visibility of how processes work and identify inefficiencies and frictions that stand in the way of principal key performance indicators, alongside the fundamental causes.
There are multiple benefits for companies that use the technology effectively. “One of the big advantages of the system is that it’s extremely visual. You don’t need to be a systems engineer to understand what’s going on,” explains Paniagua. “The platform gives you more than just an image: it’s a control panel that allows you to click to see more and expand the different process options for making decisions. It’s here that the system surprises you. The tool has allowed us to see the underlying reality of the process as a whole. It allows us to see the process with all its specific features.
“We applied process mining to a single process order preparation,” says Paniagua. “This exercise allowed us to discover and identify the main inefficiencies in our order preparation process.”
Risi was also able to see how process mining cuts across business processes as a whole, allowing the company to improve related processes, such as restocking rates, warehouse routes, customer service level agreements, and transport.
“Fujitsu has introduced us to process mining and opened our eyes to its enormous potential to improve our business,” concludes Paniagua. “Now that our systems are much more mature, we can start to think about incorporating it more widely as we move forward in our digital transformation."
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