In the middle of a mammoth migration off SAP's legacy ERP systems, global snack giant Mondelēz has found an alternative to the German vendor's tech as the main platform for understanding its complex, fragmented business processes.
The maker of Oreo cookies, Cadbury's chocolate, and Toblerone began moving its diverse ERP estate from ECC to S/4HANA two years ago, and is using a Celonis platform to model business processes after trying out SAP's technology, CIO Rossana Rizzotto told The Register.
Mondelēz has annual revenue of around $38.5 billion, 91,000 employees, and operations in around 80 countries. It was divested from Kraft Foods in 2011 and has also grown through acquisition, for example, by snapping up one of the UK's favorite chocolate makers, Cadbury. As a result, its ERP migration involved understanding processes that might be fragmented, decentralized, and varied in maturity.
The move from ECC to S/4HANA is more than a technical migration; users end up on a completely different platform and usually adopt a more standardized set of business processes on the way.
Mondelēz and its acquired companies had also customized their ECC systems. As part of the project, the company wants to make processes more efficient, review its outsourcing models, and create business growth. And it wants to lay the foundations for adopting agentic AI.
To get to grips with the problem, Rizzotto's team was looking to make greater sense of existing business processes. As a result, it was exploring process mining, which works by pulling together data from user interactions with enterprise applications and analyzing them in an attempt to reveal the "true" nature of business processes, as opposed to how they were designed or how management thinks they are performed.
Rizzotto told us Mondelēz decided against adopting SAP's process mining tool – Signavio, which it acquired in 2021 – for a technology independent of the main enterprise application vendor.
"We have a strategic partnership with SAP. In the past, we have used pockets of Signavio. We want to be agnostic as much as we can [and use] the capability of Celonis to connect with our landscape, which is ERP SAP-based, but also goes beyond SAP," she told The Register.
Founded in 2011 as a college project for consulting businesses, Celonis cut its teeth looking at processes at German engineering giant Siemens and its complex estate of SAP ERP systems.
"We started with Celonis with our initial use case at the back end of 2024. In July 2025, we made the decision to embrace it as a strategic enterprise platform," Rizzotto said.
Mondelēz is adopting the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform, which the vendor says combines data from customer systems, applications, and devices to build a "living digital twin" of operations. The CIO said it was impressed by the way it could map processes across ERP systems, but also the wider application landscape.
"Celonis has this tremendous capability to connect the very composite landscape with standard APIs. At the beginning, our ambition is to create a digital twin of the enterprise, which enables us to mirror all of our processes and capabilities in a digital way," Rizzotto said.
Mondelēz is applying process intelligence to some of its key end-to-end processes, including offshore services, in-house operations, and outsourced services. This is being applied across source-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report, and hire-to-retire.
It has already connected the platform with its top 25 transactional systems of record and is also using a "process conformity platform" to contextualize training and drive adoption based on technology from WalkMe, which is owned by SAP.
The snack maker also hopes Celonis will lay the groundwork for adopting agentic AI, although the jury is still out on which technology providers are best for deploying AI agents.
Tech vendors are vying for control of this emerging technology. Application vendors see AI agents sitting within their technology – SAP, Salesforce, and Workday all have a pitch here – and Gartner says many users will see that as a short-term, low-risk option. However, hyperscalers such as AWS want to provide agentic AI platforms to work across a portfolio of enterprise applications from different vendors.
Rizzotto said: "We are leveraging the embedded AI engine of Celonis to enable not just the mining activity, but also to rebuild in Celonis our business process knowledge. We're also looking at the technology landscape that best supports the agentic landscape that we want to either adopt ourselves or through strategic providers.
"The world is very much moving around hyperscalers. There is the opportunity for us to understand those capabilities, but we want to invest in a way that we do not tie ourselves with any of the big hyperscalers because this is also a rapidly evolving market. At the moment, we are defining our framework principles from an agentic AI standpoint."
The ERP upgrade has a timetable attached to it. SAP maintains it will end mainstream support for ECC at the end of 2027, while extended support will be available until the end of 2030 at a two percent premium.
Rizzotto is keen to see the migration as more than a technical project. "We are not concerned about [the end of support] because we started a program two years ago," she said. "This is a key overarching priority for us: the modernization of our landscape. But we want to make sure that these investments – which every company needs to do – generate value for the enterprise."
"The modernization is part of it, but at the end of the day, what you want to do is to ensure that you provide your company with a strong foundation to be able to execute those processes better and at a lower cost. So the ERP timeline is there: we are planning to go live with North America and Latin America in H2 2026, and in September we are also kicking off the MEU and AMEA plans. But what is important is that you take this as an opportunity to get ready for the future."
The Mondelēz plan also addresses the question of process standardization in large, diverse organizations. While creating a standard set of processes might look good on a whiteboard, the pain of getting to an ideal state can outweigh the benefits.
Rizzotto said: "What we are looking for is not standardization for the sake of standardization, but we are looking to create the transparency that enables us to make the right choice on where we want to adopt, eventually adapt, or even assemble. A technology landscape can be modular, so you understand what capability you want to invest in terms of out-of-the-box. So [we are deciding whether to] adopt those capabilities or assemble capabilities that create a competitive advantage."
With ERP projects as big as the one Mondelēz is taking on, the ultimate test is showing that getting thousands of employees to adopt new processes and investing millions of dollars in new technology can offer the business something to say it was all worth it. ®
Source: The register