Siemens GBS enriches employee experience

Transforming industries and enriching lives
Siemens is a true global giant in multiple fields. The 175-year-old business is Europe’s biggest industrial manufacturing company, and one of the world’s largest electronics and industrial engineering operators.

Employing over 300,000 people worldwide, Siemens aims to create technology with purpose, taking the best elements of the real and digital worlds to empower customers, transform industries, and enrich the everyday lives of billions worldwide.

Seamlessly blending the physical and digital is a vision that Siemens also looks to apply to its internal operations. Seen as innovators in this regard, Siemens AG’s Global Business Services (GBS) organization has been recognized through a number of prestigious award recognitions, including the Top 20 Most Admired Business Service Providers. In 2022, Siemens GBS was profiled by Everest Group for the second time as a Pinnacle Enterprise® in Intelligent Automation.

The long-term strategy of GBS at Siemens AG has been committed to moving from a workforce-led organization to one that is technology-led. This has required leveraging AI and automation to deliver more efficient services, greater value to the business, and an enhanced experience at a global level.

Targeting a single environment
However, moving away from a workforce-led model does not mean Siemens GBS is switching the focus away from its people―quite the opposite. A key element of the organization’s technology-led goal is enhancing its employee experience and enabling smoother processes through many of its business lines. This can be seen through its Opportunity-to-Cash program within its sales division and Purchase-to-Pay within procurement. The Hire-to-Retire program is responsible for managing end-to-end operations across the employee HR lifecycle, from onboarding to payroll, benefits, employee data management, and global mobility services. Achieving smoother processes and intuitive workflows for employees across multiple business lines can present hurdles, though.

“Siemens is a complex organization. We are present in more than 180 countries,” explains Sree Ravuri, Head of GBS Hire-to-Retire, Siemens AG. “We have a multitude of systems, especially in HR, to address regulatory requirements in each of these countries.”

Sree notes that a perennial challenge has been connecting multiple stakeholders into a single environment that provides a common experience. The Global Business Services (GBS) function was developed around 20 years ago in response to this.

As a shared service center, it originally covered HR and finance, and gradually evolved and added new responsibilities to become a multifunctional resource across 11 major delivery locations worldwide.

“Digitalization is the next step to bring GBS into the new technology-led era,” explains Matthias Egelhaaf, CIO and Chief Digitalization Officer, Global Business Services (GBS) at Siemens AG. “Each year we process 10 million invoices, six million payslips, 700,000 orders, and nearly 10 million transactional orders. There was an ideal opportunity to inject technology into those high-volume processes.”

A new platform for backbone systems
“The key requirement for this new strategic orientation was flexibility,” says Sree. “We reinvented the entire HR technology landscape and started to move towards cloud-based technologies.”

What Siemens needed was a single platform that would enable a simplified, digitized experience for GBS. Having already used ServiceNow solutions within Siemens’ central IT function, Matthias saw how ServiceNow HR Service Delivery would be able to add value. “I saw that we could collect all our backbone systems, incident and change management, all the typical service management processes of a shared service center, and move them into ServiceNow,” Matthias adds. “We could also create a really modern digital interaction layer incorporating email, chatbot, voice, and telephony.”

It was also an opportunity to carry other transformative processes across Siemens. Using a common system would involve developing standardized processes, consistent data, and common KPIs, increasing transparency across the business, and automating high-volume and repetitive procedures.

“When migrating services and centers to a similar platform, you automatically harmonize the process and data model,” says Philip Hechtl, Head of AI and Digital Service Management, Global Business Services (GBS) at Siemens AG. “We’re also centralizing the data and creating insights to help us to automate.”

Agility through integration with technical partners
Siemens AG’s complex ecosystem of technical suppliers and digital services can now be fully connected thanks to the integration capabilities offered by ServiceNow. This allows the GBS organization to be more efficient and agile, and accelerates workflow connectivity across critical business systems.

ServiceNow Integration Hub allows GBS to route cases to its customers and suppliers easily, while maintaining full control over the process.

Similarly, the GBS organization at Siemens AG can plug in and play its cloud-based telephony to Amazon or Microsoft Teams. The organization now has a single, harmonized platform, optimized workflows, and, consequently, a more productive and efficient workforce who are benefiting from an enhanced user experience (UX).

Enhanced personal, social, and digital experiences
Underpinned by ServiceNow HR Service Delivery, GBS now provides a single point of contact for Siemens employees looking to access a range of services delivered both by the Hire-to-Retire team and the wider organization.

Staff onboarding at Siemens GBS has been strengthened, with ServiceNow delivering improvements to the process in terms of personal, social, and digital experiences.

“The guided workflow is the biggest advantage of the new portal; it orchestrates the whole process,” notes Sonia Chopra-Sohanpall, Head of Digital Lab, Siemens GBS. “Before a new employee even joins, we have a relationship with them, and on their first day they have everything they need to start working. The whole user experience for the manager and employee is so much better.”

Process automation through a ‘bionic agent’ is also enhancing the employee experience, accelerating response times, reducing errors, and ensuring that the GBS and Hire-to-Retire experience is available in multiple languages.

“It’s all about impact. ServiceNow is more than just providing a robot, it’s solving a real business challenge, and we are now really measuring the results,” says Matthias, adding that Siemens GBS has already achieved one million automated hours, contributing to business productivity and competitiveness based on multiple technologies.

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