Case Study: Deutsche Telekom achieves over €66M in savings by maximizing Procure-to-Pay execution with Celonis

How Deutsche Telekom’s Shared Services Center saved over €66M

Deutsche Telekom’s Shared Services Center (Deutsche Telekom Services Europe) faced a large-scale Procure-to-Pay challenge: processing millions of invoices and orders (over 2M order items, ~9M invoices annually) while struggling with duplicate payments, lost cash discounts, blocked payments, delivery penalties and time wasted on low-value tasks. To get to root causes and standardize processes, Deutsche Telekom turned to Celonis and its Execution Management System (EMS) for process mining, visibility and automation.

Celonis connected data from 10+ systems (including SAP Ariba and Salesforce) to the EMS, deployed Process Mining and the Automation Engine, and stood up a Center of Excellence to deliver real-time KPIs, alerts and automated workflows. The results: over €66M in documented savings (including €40M annual cash-discount savings, €12M tactical savings, €10M procurement savings in 2019), €3M avoided duplicate payments, ~€1.6M recovered contractual penalties, a ~96% cash-discount capture rate and >90% on-time payments — with 1,500 Celonis users across 150 use cases.

Deutsche Telekom

Peter Tasev

SVP Procure-to-Pay