Celli Group has a refreshingly innovative take on beverage production, distribution, and consumption: behind each bubbling tap is a mountain of data, analytics, and design expertise. But getting there required a bold vision and strategic execution. Celli Group partnered with Accenture and PTC to create a digital thread spanning every part of their business—from engineering to manufacturing to the end-customer experience—transforming their business model and disrupting the beverage industry
Celli Group provides innovative products and services in the beverage industry
Celli Group is a global leader in the sector of equipment and accessories for beverage dispensing. The company, founded in 1974 and headquartered in San Giovanni in Marignano (Rimini), now has about 800 employees in six production facilities, three in Italy and three in the United Kingdom. It exports its products to over 100 countries worldwide. The mission of the Celli group is clear: to guarantee end- consumers the best drinking experience and to guarantee producers a great brand experience, all the while using the most modern technology.
Celli Group is recognized as an innovator for their use of digital technologies to enhance their customer experience. In fact, their digital transformation journey is well under way. They began their journey using PTC’s ThingWorx to create a connected beverage distribution system. The IoT-enabled solution turns manufactured or already-installed equipment into smart devices—unlocking insights where beverages are dispensed.
With the drink dispensing market booming due to the battle against plastic and single-use containers, Celli Group asked themselves how they could take their connected capabilities to the next level. They recognized an opportunity to evaluate their internal processes and determine the best way to optimize processes and deliver innovative services faster.
Celli Group and Accenture set out to up-level the performance of equipment, shorten design cycle time, and expand service offerings
Celli Group evaluated their business and IT landscape to determine how they could better serve their customers and optimize their business offerings. Previously, they relied on legacy systems and processes which created siloes between engineering, manufacturing, and service teams. Knowledge gathered from one activity wasn’t being shared upstream and downstream to inform other teams. For example, siloed data made it hard to integrate bills of material (BOMs) with engineering and testing departments, which made it difficult to innovate and create new business offerings.
Celli Group wanted to connect the engineering and manufacturing departments to the end customers—enabling them share insights and make improvements across the value chain. However, they didn’t have the right capabilities in place. To address these challenges and accelerate their digital transformation journey, Celli Group partnered with Accenture.
“PTC provided the right solutions for our industry... Accenture had the bold vision and scale necessary to achieve the results we wanted—and ultimately better serve our customers.”
Cesare Schiatti,
Digital Solution Manager at Celli Group
Celli Group chose to work with Accenture due to their expertise with PTC technology, their commitment to innovation, and their global scale. Currently, they are showcasing their smart connected solutions and products at The Center of Innovation in Turin, Italy in collaboration with global brands like Nestle and Pepsico. “Accenture had the bold vision and scale necessary to achieve the results we wanted—and ultimately better serve our customers,” says Cesare Schiatti, Digital Solution Manager at Celli Group.
Together, Celli Group and Accenture set out to leverage data from Celli Group’s connected products and unlock value across the product lifecycle by creating a digital thread. A digital thread creates a closed loop between the physical and digital worlds to optimize products, people, processes, and places; it would allow Celli Group to enhance how they communicate, manage, and analyze information, improving both products and processes. With a digital thread, Celli Group planned to optimize internal processes, drive new revenue streams, improve the customer experience, and differentiate through innovation.
Leveraging PTC’s technology suite, Celli Group transformed how they design, manufacture, and sell their products.
PTC’s domain expertise and ready-to-configure solutions powered the rapid development and customization that Celli Group needed. “We chose PTC because they provide the right solutions for our industry. We saw the huge advantage of integrating PLM into our journey,” says Schiatti.
Celli Group leveraged several PTC products, including Windchill, ThingWorx, and Vuforia solutions—as well as Microsoft Azure for secure cloud storage—as the foundation for their digital thread. ThingWorx is PTC’s IoT platform with endto-end connectivity capabilities. Celli Group used Windchill PLM as the backbone of their digital thread, establishing a single source of data across the product lifecycle. Thanks to Vuforia Studio’s integration with other PTC solutions, Celli Group can turn CAD designs into AR experiences—and Vuforia Chalk enables remote service support.
Microsoft Azure provided the global scalability and extensive interoperability capabilities that Celli Group required. Azure gives Celli Group a trusted, reliable cloud platform with state of the art, endto-end security capabilities.
Moving from siloes to a connected digital thread across people, processes, and products
With Accenture’s guidance and PTC’s solutions, Celli Group created a digital thread that unifies and orchestrates data across the product lifecycle— from design to manufacturing, to services, and back to R&D. For Celli Group, this meant digitizing processes to analyze, manage, and communicate information so decisions could be made faster and more accurately
The knowledge gleaned from one activity can now be shared upstream and downstream to inform others. Departments and teams collaborate more easily across functions, improving both products and physical processes and empowering the people involved at every step.
With the digital thread in place, Celli Group had the opportunity to easily customize products and enable groundbreaking new business models. To maximize the value of their digital thread, they extended it beyond their internal processes to encompass outside elements including customers, suppliers, and after-market partners. This created a “multi-enterprise” digital thread that’s inclusive of the product end user.
Smart Warranty contracts disrupt the beverage industry with an innovative business model
Leveraging the digital thread, they created the Smart Warranty program: a targeted approach to warranties that give customers exactly what they need, when they need it. Celli Group’s Smart Warranty leverages predictive maintenance capabilities using advanced operational modeling and data analytics. This form of preventive maintenance is based on performance against specification rather than time in service
Standard warranties are independent of component usage and are solely based on time elapsed. Celli Group’s Smart Warranty is instead based on time and the level of stress put on the equipment, which leverages a simulation of the product lifecycle and informed by real-time data. The Smart Warranty enables the creation of a map of stress conditions for preventative maintenance, so that the length of the warranty is extended or reduced according to the level of stress the equipment has undergone.
Smart Warranty and predictive maintenance capabilities enable customers to make more informed choices about system use, which can result in huge savings. Celli Group stands apart from competitors by offering a unique and innovative warranty to their customers, which in turn generates new revenue streams. Because of this unique model, Celli Group’s customers did not suffer service delays during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Predictive maintenance and AR kept our customers from experiencing the same delays other companies have due to being in lockdown,” says Schiatti.
Predictive maintenance and AR kept our customers from experiencing the same delays other companies have due to being in lockdown.
Cesare Schiatti,
Digital Solution Manager at Celli Group
Celli Group’s digital thread extends across their entire value chain, transforming their business
Ultimately, the digital thread enables Celli Group to speed time to market, improve product quality, and unlock new business models—driving an essential competitive advantage in the industry. As a result, they have improved design and manufacturing processes; accelerated time to market and shortened design time; and increased collaboration between engineering, testing, and manufacturing departments so design problems are fixed quickly.
In addition, Celli Group has created new revenue streams and an innovative business model with Smart Warranty Contracts. Their new servitization business model has resulted in Celli Group increasing customer acquisition by 20% and sellout by 14%. Predictive maintenance models have also led to huge savings. Celli Group has increased planned intervention by 8%, optimized capex reallocation by 5%, increased remote resolution by 20%, and decreased service costs by 10%.
All this innovation has resulted in new experiences for customers and optimized tools for the service division. Moving forward, Celli Group is excited to build on their digital thread capabilities. “IoT and PLM allowed us to offer new services for consumer experiences,” says Schiatti. “It’s a huge platform that we’re continuously building on.