272: Harmonizing Global Procurement Processes and Technology at Deutsche Telekom w/ Hakan Cakir

"If you were to ask me what the 'Art of Procurement' is, I would say it is bringing together the right people and the right partners." In this week's podcast, we get to listen in on a conversation about digital transformation on a global scale that was recorded at Ivalua NOW in Paris earlier this year. Hakan Cakir is the Procurement Digitalization & Analytics Product Owner of Sourcing Solutions for Deutsche Telekom AG, one of the world's leading integrated telecommunications solutions with 178 million mobile customers, 28 million fixed lines and 20 million broadband users in 50 countries. DT is best known in the US for their T-Mobile brand. The procurement steering team that Hakan works within has end-to-end responsibility for all group wide strategic procurement processes and systems including digitization and innovation roadmaps. Given the scope and scale of their project, they leveraged advocates across the company, a key decision that allowed them to harmonize their processes before implementing technology. In this conversation, Hakan talks about: Their future state vision for the source-to-contract process and how that informed technology decisions. How his team emphasized usability and acceptance testing to improve the implementation process and maximize adoption rates. Lessons learned from a broad global rollout that required change management training and communication. How DT plans to move forward towards their primary goal of building a fully data-driven procurement function. The role that emerging technologies such as chatbots may play in DT's global procurement future in the future.