MOTUL optimizes its business Processes with SAP Signavio and VISEO

Process Optimization Through Process Mining

MOTUL’s strong growth has naturally led the company on a journey toward becoming a large international mid-sized enterprise, requiring greater structure, documentation, improvement, and optimization of its business processes. MOTUL’s application landscape is centered around SAP ECC6, which will be replaced by SAP S/4HANA in 2028. Ahead of this transformation project, scheduled to begin in 2027, the Group’s Change & Transformation team launched an initial process improvement initiative called PEA (Process Efficiency Accelerator) in mid-2024.

“Management approved the initiative, provided that we focused on the areas with the most significant and longstanding pain points: procure-to-pay, manufacturing, supply chain, order-to-cash, accounts receivable, and accounts payable. The objective was to achieve substantial operational efficiency gains over the next two to three years,” explains David Aries, IT Applications Director at MOTUL.

MOTUL was looking for a solution capable of analyzing its SAP ERP processes and highlighting bottlenecks. SAP Signavio emerged as the best option for this purpose, as confirmed by a proof of concept (PoC) carried out by VISEO’s teams. Through a single data collection and analysis effort, the PoC identified substantial improvement opportunities that alone justified the purchase of the solution. Beyond the successful PoC, the project methodology proposed by VISEO convinced the manufacturer to engage in a collaborative initiative involving both business and IT teams, supported by the SAP Signavio platform.

Identifying, Prioritizing, and Resolving Process Issues

The first phase of the project focused on collecting and identifying process issues and bottlenecks.

“We relied on Process Insights, one of the tools within the SAP Signavio suite,” explains David Aries. “Connected to our ERP, it identified 120 process issues, which were then validated by business teams during a series of workshops. Additional challenges also emerged during these discussions. By the end of the process, 138 issues had been identified, 64 of which were selected for remediation under the PEA project.”

Faced with resource and time constraints, the project team prioritized the identified issues, initially focusing on quick wins.

“Some issues can be resolved simply by updating documentation or retraining users, which is sometimes enough to get a process back on track,” adds David Aries.

“Most of these quick wins have now been addressed, allowing us to focus on more complex issues that require more time to resolve. For each topic, we follow the same methodology: document the current state, define the target state based on best practices while respecting the company’s specific requirements, deploy the target process, and then measure the effectiveness of the changes through the monitoring of key performance indicators.”

Several solutions from the SAP Signavio suite are being used:

• Process Intelligence for detailed process mining and analysis of existing processes, as well as target-state design.
• Process Manager for process modeling, validation, and collaborative sharing within a single enterprise process repository.
• Process Intelligence again for ongoing monitoring and sustaining the benefits generated by process improvement initiatives over time.

VISEO supported MOTUL throughout every stage of the project, including the PoC, project scoping, development of the PEA roadmap, prioritization of improvement opportunities, and execution support across both functional and technical dimensions.

A Long-Term Strategic Solution

The MOTUL Change & Transformation team still has several months to continue improving SAP ECC processes before the SAP S/4HANA migration project begins in 2027.

“With the PEA project, we focused on our most pressing process pain points. SAP Signavio will continue to support us during the SAP S/4HANA migration, helping us redesign key processes. Other, lower-priority issues will be addressed after the deployment of our new ERP system.”

As part of the Process Efficiency Accelerator initiative, MOTUL initially focused exclusively on its SAP ECC environment. This use case will continue throughout the implementation and operation of SAP S/4HANA.

“We are also considering using Process Intelligence to analyze processes within other non-SAP applications across MOTUL’s information system. Its scope is therefore expected to gradually expand over time,” concludes David Aries.