Cloud Ready in Three Years

SAP.info: How important is the Strategy of One program (StOne) for Deutsche Post DHL?

Stefan Geilen, Deutsche Post DHL: StOne is aimed at optimizing the application landscape of Deutsche Post DHL’s Global Business Services (GBS). Our goal is to capitalize on software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing. But outsourcing only adds value to your business if you’ve optimized your internal portfolio and landscape. And that’s precisely what we’re doing. The first three steps are designed to whip our internal portfolio and IT landscape into shape and structure them as best as possible to better accommodate cloud computing and SaaS in the delivery and supply mode.

SAP.info: What is your number one priority – cutting costs or increasing flexibility?

Geilen: Both, and more. Deutsche Post DHL is a logistics service provider, not an IT company. We do, of course, have highly skilled employees, but we will never be able to top the global IT market’s power to innovate. What’s important to us is translating this innovation into flexibility, cost reduction, and better services as quickly and efficiently as possible.

SAP.info: Isn’t that a never-ending mission?

Geilen: Yes, because change is constant and innovation will never cease. But the StOne program has a clear objective. From the very beginning, we have focused on being able to measure progress, which is anything but trivial in the field of innovation. Our first results clearly demonstrate that we are on the right path and that we will reach our goals.

Will other programs follow StOne?

Sure. Mobility and Big Data are the buzzwords here. In an organization as huge as Deutsche Post DHL, you have to market these kinds of programs, you have to give your child a name. And because you need to manage resources, in other words, shore up necessary support from business divisions and from governance, it is important to set main focus areas.

SAP.info: Where does SAP fit in here?

Geilen: SAP is the backbone of our GBS IT landscape. We combined the German and global SAP systems into one site as part of our “site consolidation”. Thanks to our company history, our previous landscape was quite decentralized and fragmented, so our “application consolidation” towards a purely SAP landscape is an ongoing task. But we are making good progress on the SaaS front together with SAP. We are SAP’s development partner for its SaaS travel and expense mangament solution. Our StOne trend scouting was unable to uncover any comparable solutions that were suitable for Deutsche Post DHL. That’s why we decided to partner up with SAP on this one.

SAP.info: How important is this solution for the German postal service ?

Geilen: The solution simplifies travel management. We are a global organization with more than 480,000 employees, and our travel volume is quite high. We basically wanted to increase process efficiency. Processing taxi invoices manually is very expensive. But an SaaS-based tool, which you can use as an app on your smartphone, makes this process much easier.

Next page: What were the stumbling blocks along the way

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