The Hackett Group Announces 2023 Digital Award Winners

The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: HCKT) today announced the winners of its 10^th Annual Digital Awards, which spotlight companies that are on the cutting edge of creating competitive advantage and delivering measurable benefits at scale using digital transformation solutions. These leaders often combine intelligent automation, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to hyper-automate end-to-end business processes.

The 2023 Digital Award winners and their win categories are: Bosch Service Solutions GmbH (Contact-to-Resolution); DBS Bank Ltd (Technology Function Operations); F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. (Plan-to-Source-to-Make-to-Deliver); IBM International Services Centre Slovakia (Order-to-Cash); MTN Group Global Sourcing and Supply Chain (Source-to-Purchase); and Sanofi (Talent Management).

According to Vin Kumar, managing partner, AI and Digital Operations practice leader at The Hackett Group^®, “This year’s winners demonstrate the real progress that’s being made as automation becomes more intelligent. Step by step they have increased their sophistication and their ability to provide real value. Just a few years ago, the focus was on basic transactional automation, which led to automating full end-to-end processes. From there companies have moved to hyper-automation and beyond. Our 2023 Digital Award winners are building automation fabrics that generate real insights about customers, suppliers, users, employees and more, then use those insights to make better decisions. These systems can understand and predict behavior patterns, which is a major step forward.”

Advisory Associate Principal John Van Decker added that “We’re also starting to see the green shoots of companies using true generative artificial intelligence, building systems that can extract and summarize information from external sources as part of their work and provide greater decision-making support. Generative AI will also make for more natural interactions with chatbots as they move away from relying on structured interactions. It will be very interesting to see how companies progress with their use of generative artificial intelligence in the coming year.”

The following abstracts are drawn from the applications submitted by these 2023 Digital Award winners:

Bosch Service Solutions GmbH – Winner, Contact-to-Resolution – Digital Contact Centre: Transforming Customer Experience with Data, Artificial Intelligence and Automation

Bosch Service Solutions was given a challenging assignment – transform the performance of its contact center, which handles over one million interactions and 18 services annually across multiple communications channels with automation and technology.

The Bosch team conceptualized and implemented Digital Contact Centre, a sophisticated AI solution that incorporates robotic process optimization, text and conversational AI along with customer interaction technologies. The team trained the AI bot to handle customer inquiries and digitize contact center operations. Using natural language understanding (NLU), the new AI system would be able to understand the customers’ concerns right away, irrespective of the channel of contact from the customer.

In less than two years, the platform reduced average handling time from three minutes to 20 seconds and first level handling time from 7.9 to four minutes. Given this performance, it’s not surprising that payback on the investment took less than 12 months. And client managers see this as only the beginning. According to one contact center executive, “Since the introduction of the AI solution, the agents can take care of more complicated customer concerns and offer a better premium service because more time is available. The team has accepted the bot as another team member and is so enthusiastic that they keep bringing in suggestions and ideas for further developments. Truly a win-win-win!”

DBS Bank Ltd. – Winner, Technology Function Operations – Evolve CloudOps

When companies first started adopting cloud technology, many information technology (IT) strategists saw the cloud as the answer to running systems much more efficiently. DBS Bank was no different, though it realized early on that it needed to manage, maintain control, and reduce complexity of the cloud technology solutions it adopted.

To keep the complexity manageable, DBS Bank decided to build Evolve CloudOps, a unified cloud platform. Designed and built by DBS technologists, the platform was rolled out in three stages over five years. The first iteration, in 2018, added mostly infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities (IaaS) such as automation of server builds. Next came platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities such as runbook automation. Finally, in 2022, anything-as-a-service (Xaas) features were added, making it possible for application teams to adopt new technologies into their applications without additional coding.

DBS estimates that it took 18 months for Evolve CloudOps to see a return on investment. Since Evolve CloudOps’ launch, applications’ time-to-market decreased by 66% – from fifteen working days to five working days – while the time taken for infrastructure-to-market improved by 93%, taking just three weeks, instead of 40. Evolve CloudOps has generated a return on investment (ROI) of 131% to date.

F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. – Winner, Plan-to-Source-to-Make-to-Deliver – Generating Product Monitoring and Manufacturing Reports

Manufacturing pharmaceuticals is a stringently regulated process that requires extensive filings. Roche Pharma Technical Operations’ Digital & Operational Excellence team created a new digital solution, ReMix, that streamlined the verification process from a largely manual and paper-based system to a comprehensive digital process.

The solution enables employees to take data-driven decisions to generate value and drive efficiencies, whilst saving a huge amount of time and ensuring compliance with stringent industry standards.

IBM International Services Centre Slovakia – Winner, Order-to-Cash – Agent Assist

When internal analysts examined the performance of the IBM International Services Centre Slovakia in 2021, they learned that IBM’s EMEA super users were getting bogged down by client requests to help them with their integrated enterprise resource planning (iERP) system – an SAP platform used by quote-to-cash teams for processing orders. These high call volumes were distracting the iERP super users from more complex work.

To cope with these challenges, the company decided to train a chatbot to handle the simpler queries. The cloud-based system would leverage the natural language capabilities of the company’s Watson Services system to answer user questions and provide quick support for simple issues. The answers to 2,000 basic questions were uploaded and Agent Assist was put to work.

In its first month of operation in December 2021, Agent Assist reduced client waiting times by 1,000 hours. By the end of 2022, Agent Assist could handle over 90% of advisory questions. “The chatbot has allowed our super-user team to focus on the most complex issues while at the same time answering the simple problems with drastically reduced waiting times,” said Carol Bruce, director of Q2C Consulting for EMEA and UK.

MTN Group Global Sourcing and Supply Chain – Winner, Source-to-Purchase – Procurement Cockpit (Px360)

MTN, a South African telecommunications company, buys billions in goods and services every year for its 17+ operating companies. MTN wanted its digital procurement transformation to align with overall procurement transformation and focus on putting together a holistic picture to bring actionable insights. This required cross-pollination/aggregation of all data points from a number of digital procurement systems.

MTN used open-source data science and machine learning libraries to build an ensemble of algorithms that leverages data from various tools and brings together one view for whole organization. Aptly named as Procurement Cockpit (or Px360), the central procurement intelligence platform focuses on 3 principles:

• Sourcing Intelligence: To identify projects that can be bundled together to negotiation leverage. This is called Recommendation Engine, a Google-like platform but only for sourcing events.

• Supplier Governance: There are very limited platforms that focus on governance. MTN is taking supplier governance, due diligence checks and process compliance to the next level using an inhouse custom-made algorithm that scans all the data points and identifies patterns for flagging potential non-compliances or outlier transactions.

• Knowledge Library: Best practices across the organization are automatically identified and templatized so that they can be replicated in other functions/sourcing transactions as well.

Sanofi – Winner, Talent Management– Workday Job Change Process Excellence

After Sanofi implemented a job change process in Workday software in 2015, the implementation partner built it with a horizontal organization in mind. The partner included a lot of local exceptions in the 70+ countries where the company operates. Many employees found the system frustrating: data quality was poor, many actions required multiple approvals and payroll corrections were often required.

To see what could be improved, the pharmaceutical giant set up a pilot with QPR Process Mining to look at the existing job change process. The pilot was considered a success, which led the technical team to focus on how to make more significant improvements instead of just mitigating bad performance. This led the team to undertake a more holistic process redesign, integrating AI and removing unnecessary steps. After using SAP Signavio BPM and design thinking methodologies to imagine a better process, they combined Signavio with QPR Process Mining to ensure conformance during the roll-out.

One year after implementation, median process duration dropped from 8.9 to 0.9 days, while average process duration shrank from 35 to 6 days. Now, process transactions are taking 90% less time to complete, saving Sanofi’s People and Culture administrative employees 2,800 hours a year, while saving the technical team’s customers – the managers – 3,400 hours.

About The Hackett Group

The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: HCKT) is a leading benchmarking, research advisory and strategic consultancy firm that enables organizations to achieve Digital World Class^® performance.

Drawing upon our unparalleled intellectual property from more than 25,000 benchmark studies and our Hackett-Certified^® best practices repository from the world’s leading businesses – including 97% of the Dow Jones Industrials, 93% of the Fortune 100, 73% of the DAX 40 and 52% of the FTSE 100 – captured through our leading benchmarking platform Quantum Leap^® and our Digital Transformation Platform, we accelerate digital transformations, including enterprise cloud implementations.

For more information on The Hackett Group, visit: https://www.thehackettgroup.com/; email [email protected]; or call (770) 225-3600.

The Hackett Group, Hackett-Certified, quadrant logo, World Class Defined and Enabled, Quantum Leap, Digital World Class and Hackett Value Matrix are the registered marks of The Hackett Group.

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