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) organisation has been recognised 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 organisation 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 organisation'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 programme within its sales division and Purchase-to-Pay within procurement. The Hire-to-Retire programme 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 organisation. 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 centre, it originally covered HR and finance, and gradually evolved and added new responsibilities to become a multifunctional resource across 11 major delivery locations worldwide.
"Digitalisation is the next step to bring GBS into the new technology-led era", explains Matthias Egelhaaf, CIO and Chief Digitalisation Officer, Global Business Services (GBS) at Siemens AG. "Each year we process 10 million invoices, 6 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, digitised 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 centre 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 standardised processes, consistent data and common KPIs, increasing transparency across the business, and automating high-volume and repetitive procedures.
"When migrating services and centres to a similar platform, you automatically harmonise 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 centralising the data and creating insights to help us to automate".
United Kingdom - English
