"We started talking to TSO, can we do an app, and they were like yes we can but it's going to take two years or three. Okay, but what if we combine app with RPA? Both can be done quickly, most likely. And that's what we actually did, and now we actually have the app out in the field and our technicians call it the Swiss Knife of field service, because they can do everything with it."

On this episode of the SSON podcast, Sebastian Ziess, Vice President of the Lean Management Competence Centre at Deutsche Tekelom shares an insight into how the telecom provider’s shared service organisation is using a holistic approach to address the business’ needs. Sebastian also shares how they are tackling employee pushback to automation through opportunity and education. Press play and listen to discover more about:

• How renaming their Centre of Excellence  to a ‘Lean Management Competence Centre' transformed its relationship with the business: Sebastian explains how business units now perceive them as consultancy, rather than “people who tell them what to do”. 


• Why moving from a purely automation-focused mind set that encouraged a ‘hammer every nail’ approach, the organisation now applies Lean methodologies to look at challenges more holistically and can identify alternative, more appropriate, ways of approaching them.


• How this new approach lead to the development of an app that has become the ‘Swiss army knife of field service’, helping to reduce the amount of time field service engineers spent calling their internal contacting centres, and increase the time they spend offering a great experience to their customers.


• Why introducing a performance metric that measures employee happiness has proven to be an effective way to increase organisational productivity and why change management should be a priority, even in the earliest stages of a transformation.


• How the Lean Management Competence Centre is proving to employees that automation is not a threat but an opportunity and iscreating ‘positive attrition’ by training employees for future careers as RPA programmers, analysts or AI specialists.

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