Siemens GBS streamlines global order management with Pega

The Business Issue

Headquartered in Munich, Germany, Siemens Global Business Services (GBS) serves clients across 34 countries. They provide business services for Siemens AG, Siemens Energy AG, and Siemens Healthineers AG alongside a roster of external customers, with a primary focus to enable their customers to accelerate their business transformation into a sustainable and digital future.

But despite their global reach and noble mission, Siemens GBS faced significant challenges in the order management process, relying on inefficient methods such as email, SharePoint, and Excel – tools that cobbled together a process but fell short of the seamless orchestration required for today’s speed of change.

They had been handling the order management process manually, relying on a shared email mailbox and various disjointed applications. This approach led to a lack of transparency, productivity issues, and an overwhelming volume of requests. Orders languished in shared inboxes, disjointed applications jumbled the workflow, and innovation was hindered by the very procedures that most needed transformation.

Siemens GBS also faced challenges handling exceptions within their processes for contract management, inquiry complaints, order booking, delivery follow-up, and automated billing – all of which required manual effort and impacted productivity.

These manual methods failed to meet Siemens GBS’s standards for innovation, and the need to streamline operations, automate processes, and enhance digitalization became evident. Recognizing this, Siemens GBS sought a solution that could scale and adapt to the requirements of their many different teams across regions, allowing for expansion without rewriting or rebuilding applications.

The Solution

Using the flexibility of the Pega Platform™, Siemens GBS built their own Digital Order Management application that improved efficiency, automation, and digitalization. This application served as the core solution to resolve exceptions, enabling order managers to efficiently handle discrepancies and mismatches. Additionally, Pega's inquiry complaint use case addressed customer inquiries and complaints, which had previously been managed through emails.

The team continued to identify key use cases and developed applications accordingly – focusing on areas such as self-service portals and integrated interfaces. They demonstrated ambition and resilience by starting with a simple application and expanding it to comprehensive solutions that address the needs of different teams and locations.

The self-service portal, once met with resistance, is now widely adopted, with some regions achieving 100% utilization. The unified dashboard provided by Pega Platform has transformed the work experience for order managers, eliminating the need to navigate multiple applications and enhancing overall productivity.

Siemens GBS successfully used Pega to harmonize a cacophony of processes – from contract management to billing – into cohesive and transparent workflows that are adaptable and scalable, without the burden of constant rewriting.

The Results

Siemens GBS’s Pega-powered digital order management application has seen substantial success. The implementation resulted in significant improvements across multiple areas, including:

• Scalability: The project initially started with three main hubs and expanded to 24 countries, with more to come. The application has proven infinitely scalable and adaptable to Siemens' diverse product portfolio and varying levels of maturity across different divisions and regions.
• Increased efficiency and transparency: The application streamlined processes, providing greater visibility and transparency for order managers, sales teams, and finance departments. With automated booking and billing processes, Siemens can now focus resources on exceptional cases rather than manual order management.
• Environmental commitment: Siemens GBS allocated a portion of the revenue generated by the Digital Order Management application to environmental initiatives – including planting trees based on the volume of cases processed.

But that’s not all. Siemens GBS continues to evolve their digital transformation journey with Pega. They plan to use Pega Constellation, explore the potential of process mining, and train their team to utilize App Studio for faster delivery. They have embraced a proactive approach, reaching out to customers with innovative solutions and showcasing the possibilities of the Pega Platform.

Results at a glance:

• Implemented a single Digital Order Management application
• Serviced 243 teams in 34 countries
• Digitalized more than 4x of the initially intended scope
• Users have grown by 10x, from 500 to more than 5,000
• Integrated 34 ERP entities, streamlining processes and reducing manual effort
• Reduced customer onboarding time from two weeks to 24 hours
• Development time is five to six times faster than before

Watch Siemens' in-depth journey here.