Streamlining order management in telecommunications

Most people wouldn’t consider order management the most exciting part of business, but perhaps they should.

For Deutsche Telekom, order management sits at the very heart of our business operations. It’s the activation point, the moment when things start to get real. Done badly, it can create disparate silos, inefficient orchestration, slow delivery times, high costs, and a poor customer experience. We don’t want that.

One of Deutsche Telekom’s ambitions is to be the best B2B telecom company in the world. We’re working with ServiceNow to streamline our order management process. This will allow us to bring solutions to market faster, increase productivity, and reduce the complexity of our web of legacy systems.

Uniting architectural silos

In 2020, we integrated the telecom businesses of T-Systems International and T-Deutschland to form a B2B powerhouse. This required the creation of 33 new company codes in 27 countries and approximately 37,000 projects.

In our quest to be a lighthouse for medium and enterprise mass-market businesses, we aim to have a portfolio of software-defined services, enable collaboration between customers and partners, and create state-of-the-art customer relationship management (CRM).

It’s critical we present as one telco for our customers, whether they’re voice, mobile, broadband, or IT. To drive this transformation, we need an order management platform that unites our architectural silos. Creating an overlay across these silos will allow convergent product offerings, accelerate transformation, and mitigate the risk of being bound to legacy systems.

From an operational perspective, this will enable us to reuse resources, cut duplication, and work with standard, mass-market products. Consistency will also improve the employee experience while we retain the ability to address domain-specific issues. All of this will create efficiency.

Enabling a seamless, connected experience

The Now Platform is the heart of our new order management. It ensures individual platforms communicate with one another via OpenAPI and allows us to allocate legacy applications to different domains.

Transaction data—whether customer order, service order, or resource order—gets integrated and orchestrated and moves efficiently. ServiceNow is integrated with SAP CPQ and SAP BRIM, and we’ve also integrated Salesforce contract data.

When our transformation is complete, we’ll have a 360-degree view of orders and product inventory. This will enable one overarching consumer interface across all inventories, allowing customers to self-serve.

We’re already reaping the benefits. We’re less reactive, we’ve lowered our cost of operations, and we have a higher Net Promoter Score. There are no inventory silos, only a single source of truth. Our sales or service teams can call up the exact details of a customer’s products history in seconds, thanks to a seamless, connected experience.

Learn more about Deutsche Telekom’s order management transformation in our Knowledge 2021 session. Registration is free.

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