The boardrooms of global consumer goods giants do not usually attract much attention from technology strategists, but the decision quietly announced by Mondelēz International this week is one that CIOs across the corporate world will want to study carefully. The maker of Oreo cookies, Cadbury chocolate, and Toblerone has formally chosen Celonis as the process intelligence backbone of its sprawling SAP migration, opting for an independent vendor rather than the tooling offered by SAP itself.
According to The Register, Mondelēz began moving its enterprise resource planning estate from SAP's legacy ECC platform to S/4HANA two years ago, with CIO Rossana Rizzotto overseeing an effort that touches roughly 91,000 employees and operations across approximately 80 countries. The company reports annual revenue of around $38.5 billion, and its technology footprint reflects decades of acquisition-led growth, including the absorption of Cadbury from Kraft Foods after the 2011 demerger that created Mondelēz as a standalone company.
That acquisition history matters enormously in the context of this migration. Each company Mondelēz absorbed brought its own customised SAP systems, its own process quirks, and its own degrees of maturity. The result is an ERP estate that Rizzotto's team describes as fragmented and decentralised, a reality that makes the standard playbook of simply lifting and shifting to S/4HANA inadequate on its own. To make sense of how business processes actually function, as opposed to how they appear in org charts or process diagrams, the company turned to process mining.
Why Not SAP's Own Tool?
The choice of Celonis over SAP's Signavio product is the detail that will raise eyebrows. SAP acquired Signavio in 2021 and has positioned it as the natural complement to S/4HANA migrations. For a company with a declared strategic partnership with SAP, passing on that option is a deliberate statement. Rizzotto told The Register directly:
"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."
The logic is straightforward from a fiscal governance perspective. Mondelēz's application estate does not begin and end with SAP. Tying its core process intelligence layer to an SAP-owned tool would create a dependency that limits flexibility precisely at the moment when enterprise technology is becoming more modular, not less. Industry analysts at Gartner have noted that embedding AI agents within a single vendor's ecosystem may look like a low-risk option in the short term, but the hyperscaler competition for agentic AI infrastructure is fierce enough that locking in early carries real strategic cost.
Celonis itself is no lightweight contender. Founded in 2011 as a university project aimed at consulting businesses, it built its early reputation analysing the labyrinthine SAP systems of German engineering giant Siemens. Its Process Intelligence Platform, which Mondelēz is now adopting, claims to combine data from enterprise systems, devices, and applications to construct what the company calls a "living digital twin" of operations. Mondelēz ran an initial proof-of-concept in late 2024 before committing to Celonis as a strategic enterprise platform in July 2025.
The Vendor Lock-In Debate
The case for SAP's integrated approach is not without merit, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging it. SAP Signavio benefits from deep, native integration with S/4HANA data structures, and for organisations whose application estate is predominantly SAP, the argument for keeping process intelligence within that ecosystem is genuinely compelling. Support from a single vendor simplifies contractual relationships, reduces integration overhead, and, as some enterprise buyers note, can accelerate time-to-value when the core system and the analytical layer speak the same data language from day one.
The counter-argument, and the one Mondelēz has backed with real investment, is that the enterprise technology market is shifting fast enough to make any form of deep lock-in a liability. Hyperscalers including AWS are aggressively building agentic AI platforms designed to sit across multi-vendor application portfolios, and the company that has committed its intelligence layer to a single ERP vendor may find itself at a disadvantage when that battle is settled. Rizzotto was candid about this uncertainty, telling The Register that Mondelēz is still defining its framework principles for agentic AI and deliberately avoiding commitments to any single hyperscaler in a market she describes as rapidly evolving.
A Race Against the Clock
The broader urgency here is one that technology leaders across the corporate world are grappling with. SAP ends mainstream support for ECC at the close of 2027, with extended support available until 2030 at a two percent premium on standard maintenance fees. The deadline sounds manageable until you look at the scale of what remains undone. Research into SAP migration programmes published earlier this year found that most large migrations bust both budgets and timelines, a finding reinforced by the Quebec vehicles agency's SAP project, which ran C$245 million over budget and left executives questioning whether the system was needed at all.
Mondelēz's timetable is ambitious. The company plans to go live with North America and Latin America in the second half of 2026, with Middle East, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions following from September of that year. Rizzotto framed the deadline not as a source of anxiety but as an organising principle, insisting the company is not rushing because it started two years ago and is treating the migration as a platform for long-term operational improvement rather than a compliance exercise.
The company has already connected Celonis to its top 25 transactional systems of record and is applying process intelligence across source-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report, and hire-to-retire workflows. It is also using WalkMe, a digital adoption platform now owned by SAP, to contextualise training and drive uptake of new processes among its workforce.
What emerges from the Mondelēz story is a picture of a company trying to thread a genuinely difficult needle: modernise a vast and historically fragmented technology estate, extract measurable cost savings, avoid strategic dependency on any single vendor, and simultaneously position itself for an AI-driven future whose shape is not yet clear. The decision to choose Celonis over Signavio is less a rebuke of SAP than a hedge against uncertainty. In a migration of this complexity, across this many countries and business units, the ability to connect processes that extend beyond any single vendor's walled garden may prove to be the most valuable capability of all. Whether the investment ultimately delivers the efficiency gains Rizzotto is promising remains, as it always does with programmes of this scale, the question that only time will answer.