PIL Builds a Real-Time Digital Twin of Its Operations With Celonis and WNS
The Singapore carrier is expanding a Process Intelligence Centre of Excellence across 90 countries.
Pacific International Lines has partnered with Celonis and WNS, part of Capgemini, to expand its global Process Intelligence Centre of Excellence, covering operations in 90 countries.
The Singapore-headquartered carrier operates a fleet of more than 100 container vessels, which means visibility problems compound across trades, offices and systems rather than staying local. The Celonis platform is being used to build a dynamic, real-time digital twin of the company's operations, giving teams a view of how processes are actually executed rather than how they are documented. WNS brings shipping domain knowledge to the centre of excellence and is responsible for embedding the tooling across PIL's systems.
Three outcomes are being targeted. The first is end-to-end visibility across global shipping workflows, from customer-facing operations through to back-office processing. The second is faster identification and resolution of operational inefficiencies through process standardisation across trade operations. The third is a foundation for AI-driven automation, on the argument that automation applied to an unmapped process simply makes an inconsistent process faster.
Lionel Chatelet, Chief Commercial Officer at PIL, described the underlying problem in plain terms: in shipping a company is often dealing with dozens of different systems around the world, which makes it hard to see where things are actually slowing down. He said the platform provides a single clear view of how processes run in real life, and framed the goal as learning how to make operations leaner and faster and integrating automation and AI by design into continuous improvement, rather than efficiency for its own sake.
Pascal Coubard, VP of APAC at Celonis, said that giving enterprise AI a holistic, living model of business operations creates the conditions for it to drive outcomes and return on investment.
The pattern is becoming familiar across the liner sector. Carriers accumulated systems faster than they accumulated integration, and the resulting fragmentation is now the binding constraint on both cost and service reliability. Mapping the processes is the unglamorous prerequisite; whether it produces measurable margin depends on what the organisation does with the map.
