As you can guess, the more bots a company has to implement the more complex is the task to seamlessly and successfully manage them. We have told a lot of stories about RPA journeys of different companies where just a few or dozens of robots were deployed. But this story we are going to tell you is kind of exceptional because it is going about thousands of software robots just at one enterprise – Deutsche Telekom. So, here we go.
COMPANY
Deutsche Telekom AG is a German telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn and by revenue the largest telecommunications provider in Europe. For many years, Deutsche Telekom has featured among Fortune 500 companies with its latest ranking 86 in 2020. The business experienced swift and significant results over the last years and became one of the biggest RPA users in Europe as it scaled up RPA automation in different lines of business.
CHALLENGE
By 2018, with seven different RPA platforms and seven different libraries to maintain, the business began to experience issues at scale. The complex nature of this automation setup meant that a single change in the main CRM system led to change requests on four different RPA platforms. Due to the nature of RPA technology, it could not be easily combined with different tasks – such as manual task – or RPA technologies from different vendors, Deutsche Telekom began to experience major problems as it looked to implement end-to-end processes.
SOLUTION
In 2018, Deutsche Telekom undertook a new strategy in an attempt to alleviate the challenges it had been experiencing. Through the consolidation of the seven RPA platforms into three, selected due to their high scalability and functionality, the business attained new centralized governance. It allowed for collective decisions on whether future solutions should be bot-driven or become a core IT solution.
Deutsche Telekom developed a new platform, OREO, to separate the process and technical layer. Camunda’s workflow engine was implemented to handle all business processes in business process model and notation (BPMN) and decision model and notation (DMN), and to orchestrate RPA and user tasks across end-to-end processes.
Business experts were able to cut out unnecessary tasks and refine individual steps from old RPA-driven processes, reinventing them. Following this, developers were able to automate each step of the process.
BENEFIT
Savings of more than €93M in 2019 automating more than 450 processes managed by 3,000 unattended bots.
