Automation
From 40 to 0 in 24 hours
A peek behind the scenes at the Global Transaction Center shows how automation is improving quality of service and changing the way our Service Center colleagues work.
40 minutes! That was the average time our colleagues from Procurement Management used to need to process a single application for the BahnCard, Germany’s cut-price rail card. 40 minutes to verify the user data, check the cost center, copy data from one form to another, manage the approval workflow with the line manager, and communicate with the authorized travel partner. But the time the Procurement team now requires has been slashed to virtually zero since December 2019.
Abhishek Chandrashekarapura, Associate Procurement at the Global Transaction Center in Berlin, explains how he and his colleagues are optimizing this and similar processes: “We are trying to automate individual processes in a way that reduces the administration effort, while improving the service experience for our colleagues all around the world.”
Savings of 10,000 minutes a year
The team begins that process with a work instruction called a desktop procedure, a sort of detailed description. In the case of the BahnCard application, that comprised all steps from opening of the application form to receipt of the actual card. All steps in the process are then analyzed and digitized where possible. One such step is checking whether an e-mail address or cost center is valid. These processes are then connected and automated sequentially using tools like Microsoft Power Automate.
In the specific process described here, the team needed 24 hours of work to effectively reduce the Procurement team’s manual work on BahnCard applications to 0. If, say, there are roughly 250 of the cards in use at the company and they all have to be renewed every year, the time savings soon add up to 10,000 minutes a year.
A strong team (from left to right): Enza Andrian, Abhishek Nagaraj, Yuan Chih Lee and Georgia Tasiopoulou
Time advantages for users
Abhishek Chandrashekarapura emphasizes that “automation also has significant benefits for the user, as the processing does not depend on the physical availability or free capacity of a procurement colleague anymore.” While the average wait for the digital version of the BahnCard used to be more than one day, turnaround time between application submission and delivery of the BahnCard number, which allows immediate travel, is now often as low as 45 minutes.
A similar improvement was achieved in creating employee accounts for the Deutsche Bahn Business Portal. The Procurement team previously required 15 minutes to create a single account. Thanks to complete digitization and automation of the process, manual processing is no longer needed and applicants obtain their access data in just two minutes. |
Head of the Global Transaction Center (GTC) Procurement and IT
3 questions for Maik Müller
1. What role does automation play for the GTC?
First of all, automation is extremely important for us in the GTC. After all, we are not a click factory that just executes the same processes manually thousands of times. We always strive to understand, improve and standardize all our business processes to get faster, better, and more reliable in our service delivery. Automation helps us do that, but it isn’t an end in itself. Experience shows that a bad process is still a bad process even after it’s been automated. It will deliver the same poor results, just sooner and more reliably. We therefore analyze and improve the process before we even start thinking about automating it. It can be automated sensibly only if you have a sound understanding of the process, the related workload and the result that’s expected.
2. What does increasing automation mean for our colleagues behind the scenes at the GTC?
Increasing automation is preparing all of us well for the future world of work. It’s my firm conviction that in five to ten years’ most of our KWS colleagues at the GTC will be expected to be skilled in robotics, artificial intelligence or data analysis just like they now need to know how to use Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint. Intelligent use of these technologies increasingly gives a service organization like the GTC a crucial competitive edge. After all, we’re embracing automation not to reduce the workforce, but to offer our KWS colleagues worldwide more and better services.
That’s why we encourage our GTC colleagues to develop themselves through tackling these challenges, true to the spirit of our “Make yourself grow” ethos. We want to give them the opportunity to learn more about new technologies and apply that knowledge in their everyday activities. We’ve already offered robotics workshops for all GTC employees, for example. Process automation and data analysis are regular issues discussed at the meetings of our Automation Ambassadors. Everyone is invited to join us on this journey and contribute.
3. How are new digital tools at KWS, such as O365, enabling automation?
Microsoft Office 365 (O365) currently offers a broad portfolio of digital automation tools. Even users without an extensive IT background or specific programming skills can automate processes thanks to Power Automate (formerly known as Microsoft Flow) and Power Apps. Microsoft recently even rolled out functions that enable simple automation in legacy programs and applications from third-party vendors. That is complemented by additional O365 tools for integrating data collection (Microsoft Forms, for example) and data analysis and visualization (such as Microsoft PowerBI). |
Info:
Maik Müller
maik.mueller@kws.com
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