digital transformation Content

Deutsche Telekom Services Europe (DTSE) is known as the innovation-building speedboat of the telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom Group. Like many large organizations in recent years DTSE has turned its attention to technology to help improve effectiveness, efficiency and customer experience, and to boost the firm’s agility and resilience for the future. For DTSE that journey began 10 years ago, when Peter Tasev, Senior Vice President of Procure to Pay, recognized the need for a standardized accounting process across the group. This was the beginning of what turned into the construction of a centralized platform, standardized master data and standardized processes across the whole procure-to-pay ecosystem. It resulted in decreased costs, increased quality and customer satisfaction, and contributed to the identification of new revenue streams and growth through innovation and technology.

It has been a long journey to systematically increase the scope and scale of the programme across departments, but has now changed the way business is done throughout shared services. We were interested to understand from Peter what the drivers for change had been, the challenges he and his team faced during the P2P transformation, the triumphs and the learnings.

For our new monthly CPO interview series, Spend Matters' Nancy Clinton talks with Sergii Dovgalenko, an experienced procurement strategist and transformation executive. He is also a licensed tutor and author — his most recent book being “The Technology Procurement Handbook: A Practical Guide to Digital Buying." Prior to being CPO of JSC Ukrainian Railways, he was head of procurement for Etihad Airways in the UAE, where he headed up indirect procurement and P2P operations. He shares some career and recent insights.

“The interesting aspect of this,” explains Sergii, “is that we find ourselves working within parts of the business you wouldn’t normally expect for procurement."

Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Sergii Dovgalenko, CPO at JSC Ukrainian Railway.

During these times of Industry 4.0, many companies have substantially progressed on the path toward digital transformation. Fellow procurement colleagues operate their new shiny source-to-contract suites, P2P and SRM tools. However, one critical aspect of digitalization sometimes remains forgotten or insufficiently addressed — data integration.

The procurement value chain spreads well beyond the S2C cycle — it starts from planning and goes all the way to supplier performance and risk management. Even if your chief architect is a genius, and managed to build the fully integrated digital pipeline of planning, budgeting, sourcing, contracting, material management, P2P and SRM modules, where tasks freely flow from one section to another, data integration may remain a challenge. This guest post examines the importance of understanding data integration.