Imagine running a global operation with factories in more than 65 countries, managing 70,000 purchased parts, handling 100,000 finished goods, and issuing over 2,100 purchase order lines every single day.
That is the reality for Molex, a global leader in electronic and fiber optic connectivity solutions.
When operating at that massive scale, even tiny manual errors or minor process friction can snowball into major delivery delays. Molex needed clear visibility to spot bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and maintain their high standard of on-time delivery.
Here is how Molex teamed up with Celonis to gain end-to-end visibility, boost order confirmation rates, and bring intelligent automation into their supply chain and warehouse operations.
The Challenge: Navigating Low Process Visibility
Molex’s Procurement-to-Pay (P2P) cycle involved high volumes and distributed teams working across multiple time zones and languages. Before partnering with Celonis, they faced a core operational hurdle: limited visibility into process bottlenecks.
For example:
- Low Confirmation Rates: Only about 30% of purchase orders had confirmed delivery dates easily tracked in the system.
- Manual Work Overload: Buyers were spending 8–9 hours a week manually creating and checking purchase requisitions—even for routine, low-value items down to a single dollar.
- Siloed Insights: Departmental teams lacked a single, shared view of how master data changes impacted downstream warehouse and fulfillment processes.
Molex needed an operational "MRI scan" to diagnose friction points instantly and act with confidence.
The Solution: A Process Intelligence Layer
By deploying Celonis over their ERP systems and collaboration platforms, Molex created a central layer of process intelligence across two key areas:
1. Streamlining Procure-to-Pay (P2P)
Celonis immediately revealed that buyers were wasting hours manually approving tiny, low-risk purchase requisitions. With these insights, Molex adjusted their ERP parameters to allow routine orders to flow through automatically.
This single adjustment eliminated unnecessary manual touchpoints, allowing buyers to focus on strategic exceptions and high-value supplier relationships.
"Imagine you can put an MRI machine on top of your ERP and you've got all the insights that you want. Celonis allows you to scan the whole process end-to-end with one click."
— Tony Gainsford, Sr. Director of Supply Chain, Molex
2. Building a Digital Twin in Warehouse Operations
Molex carried this success into their Order-to-Cash and Warehouse Management workflows. MJ Patil, Director of Process Excellence, used Celonis to build a living digital twin of warehouse operations.
This allowed warehouse managers to:
- Track exact arrival and departure timelines.
- Simulate operational changes before rolling them out on the floor.
- Educate buyers on how mid-stream order changes create downstream delays.
The Impact: Real Numbers, Global Scale
By replacing intuition with real-time data, Molex achieved game-changing results across their global operations:
- 90% PO Confirmation Rate: Skyrocketed from a baseline of ~30%, significantly improving on-time customer deliveries.
- 87% Touchless Invoices: Streamlined invoicing processes so the majority of transactions post automatically.
- 15% Efficiency Boost: Achieved up to a 15% efficiency improvement in initial warehouse implementations, with plans to replicate the framework globally.
- Hours Saved Weekly: Freed procurement teams from repetitive manual data entry, shifting hours of labor back into value-add activities.