Overview

pDeutsche Telekom Services Europe (DTSE) builds solutions for the entire Deutsche Telekom Group, ranging from automatization solutions to data processing and mining. They operate in the business areas Finance, Reporting, Procurement and HR. Deutsche Telekom Services Europe has around 3600 employees in 10 European locations and generated a revenue of €376M in 2017./p

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

pAs the services center for the entire group, Deutsche Telekom Services Europe had massive amounts of data - over 2 million order items and nearly 9 million invoices per year - to sift through, make sense of, and determine how to maximize efficiency and effectiveness gains while minimizing effort. The sheer volume made gathering insights tedious and previous efforts at gleaning insights proved too unwieldy or reliant on manual work to scale. DTSE knew that they needed a powerful platform with the capability to synthesize and transform data and dial down into granular insights,so they turned to an obvious choice: Celonis Process Mining powered by the Intelligent Business Cloud./p

The Solution

pDTSE had successfully digitalized all of their core processes and were aware of some pain points, but they continued to struggle to understand the root causes, determine how to address, and operationalize action. Celonis’ out of the box connectors and real-time data pipelines to Salesforce and SAP enabled unprecedented visibility into their process flows. In total, Celonis created visibility across 10 different source systems.  “I was astonished when I saw what Celonis could do for the very first time. There is simply nothing comparable on the market,” says Peter Tasev, SVP Procure-to-Pay for DTSE. Armed with an always up-to-date knowledge of how their processes actually run, DTSE could now not only define new KPIs, but also develop an early warning system for the KPIs going off-track.Celonis’ real-time capabilities and ability to look comprehensively at the whole process, as well as the individual root causes, was crucial to DTSE’s improvement efforts./p

The results

pDTSE established a Center of Excellence and brought structure to how their employees use Celonis to make sense of the data. By introducing personas and structuring their internal processes, DTSE operationalized continuous insights and improvements that were powered by Celonis./p pExecutive / Business Users monitor process performance on KPIs and derive intelligent recommendations to execute the right actions./p pBusiness Analysts have the knowledge to translate business needs into IT requirements and to conduct complex analyses./p pData Analysts translate the data into actionable business insights and create target-oriented analyses./p pData Scientists connect and maintain processes technically. They also create and maintain the data models in the backend. /p pBecause Celonis was well integrated on both the business and IT sides, it became the engine by which DTSE uncovered improvement opportunities, activated those improvements across the organization and continuously monitored the improvements to ensure that objectives were being met. /p

Metrics

pAt present DTSE has more than 1,500 Celonis users and more than 150 use cases from different streams, especially Procure-to-Pay, Hire-to-Retire Buy-to-Scrap./p pThe identification of double payments in Procure-to-Pay realized savings of € 3M in 2019, and the additional realized cash discount by active cash discount management resulted in a 95% cash discount ratio and more than € 40M cash discount per year. In addition, between January and November 2019, contractual penalty management led to savings of € 1,6M./p pIn total, the no touch rate in Procure-to-Pay has been increased to 86% (DTSE couldn’t measure their no touch rate before deploying Celonis’ technology), resulting in € 12M in tactical savings./p

The Technology

pDTSE used Celonis for their procurement transformation: 1)Set up self-service BI for easy direct access to reports 2)Process visualization removes inefficiencies to prevent double payments. 3)Cash discount monitor for real time reporting of blocked invoices to realize cash discounts 4) Contractual penalty management to assess penalty options. 5) Real time alerting notifies process owners of rule breaches. A predefined workflow alerts for 3 Way Match, Duty Segregation, Fraud Prevention/p

Disruptive Factor

pDTSE’s setup is in itself unique. SVP of Procure-to-Pay Peter Tasev notes that having Procurement and Accounts Payable in one shared services center is unique; However, the combination of Procurement, Accounts Payable, HR, and Reporting under one roof enables a highly digitized Procure-to-Pay process. This also enables other departments to remain laser-focused on what they do best, leaving the purchasing, negotiation, purchasing etc to the professionals. /p p The success DTSE has seen with Celonis has ushered forth a new way of working and has set the standard for data integrity and data-driven improvement initiatives: Tasev says, “The vision I have for my business area is that in five years’ time, nobody will need to touch our transactional system, unless the AI requests or suggests it.”/p

Shining Moment

pToday, over 1,500 employees use Celonis for 150 use cases. DTSE has been so successful that they plan to expand the use of Celonis in 2021 to Supply Chain, customer service journey and many others. DTSE is most proud of how Celonis has embedded itself: “We have people from [our internal control system], Audit, Finance, Controlling, and Technology coming together to discuss end-to-end process improvements using the Celonis technology,” says Tasev./p