3M, Allied World Insurance, DBS Bank, Duke Energy, ENGIE, MTN Group, and Pfizer Recognized for Their Cutting-Edge Digital Transformation Achievements

The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: HCKT) today announced the winners of its 2022 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 customer-centric automation, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) to hyper-automate end-to-end business processes. This year’s winners, and their win categories, are: 3M (Purchase-to-Pay), Allied World Insurance Company (Market-to-Opportunity), DBS Bank (Business Operations), Duke Energy (Plan-to-Source-to-Make-to-Deliver), ENGIE (Order-to-Cash), MTN Group (Source-to-Purchase), and Pfizer (Hire-to-Retire).

According to Vin Kumar, managing partner and Digital Operations Advisory practice leader at The Hackett Group^®, “This year’s Digital Award winners have delivered significant benefits and demonstrated the multiplier effect that is enabled by digital transformation across end-to-end processes. What is surprising is the scale, both in terms of benefits and process breadth, and the speed of implementation. The sophistication of the end-to-end digital solutions that companies are able to implement is clearly growing exponentially.”

According to Gilles Bonelli, associate principal and European Finance, EPM & Analytics Advisory practice leader, “This year we’re seeing a much broader range of top-line and bottom-line benefits and greater overall business impact. Companies are finding they can truly implement solutions that effectively integrate AI, automation and analytics.”

The following abstracts are drawn from the applications submitted by these 2022 Digital Award winners:

3M Company – Winner, Purchase-to-Pay -- Procurement Process Reconciliation via Automation

3M, the $35 billion global material science company, built a hyper-automation (RPA + Workflow + AI) solution to optimize the process that match invoices, purchase orders and goods received. This hyper-automation solution uses a Blue Prism bot integrated with 3M ERP system, Salesforce, a cognitive reconciliation engine to resolve mismatches, and Power BI process analytics – all hosted on an Azure cloud. This resulted in improved productivity, employee satisfaction and stronger return on investment for the company.

Allied World Insurance Company, Powered by Infosys BPM – Winner, Market-to-Opportunity – Underwriting Preparation Services

The United States direct underwriting team of Allied World Insurance Company partnered with Infosys BPM to streamline the desk of production underwriters to optimize workflows by providing time-saving digital tools. The pre-underwriting process can be time- and labor-intensive drawing away from the core underwriting analysis and decision-making. The digital tools have allowed underwriters to respond faster to our brokers and clients with meaningful solutions for our partners’ needs.

DBS Bank – Winner, Business Operations – Automated Financial Analysis (AutoFIN)

DBS Bank’s Institutional Banking Group’s relationship managers prepare detailed financial analysis that accompanies each credit application. The previous process was manual and time-consuming for relationship managers to execute.

To streamline this process, developers at the $59 billion Singapore-headquartered bank built AutoFIN, an advanced tool that has automated much of this preparation work and generates a first draft financial analysis for relationship managers. AutoFIN has reduced the time that relationship managers spend on this task by approximately 30%, giving them more opportunity to focus on higher-value tasks such as building better client relationships. The consistent format generated by AutoFIN also reduces the risk of human error and streamlines analysis and decision-making. “Forget about going through tons of paperwork – AutoFIN can really change the way we work,” said Tan Su Shan, group head of Institutional Banking for DBS.

DBS developers say that in addition to saving a great deal of time, AutoFIN has generated a 72% return on investment since its rollout in June 2021.

Duke Energy – Winner, Plan-to-Source-to-Make-to-Deliver – Health & Risk Management Application

The company, which serves 8.2 million utility customers, had a problem: how to keep tabs on 31,000 miles of interstate transmission infrastructure, including 30,000 transformers, regulators and circuit breakers.

It was a monumental job. Duke Energy’s asset management professionals and subject matter experts needed to gather information from at least six different sources to get a picture of the state of the 1,000 separate assets each of them had to monitor – a time-consuming and tedious task that took three to four weeks to complete. It was so much work that the company could only complete a full inventory once a year, not often enough to make cost-effective condition-based maintenance possible.

Duke Energy’s Health & Risk Management (HRM) application is changing all that by identifying performance anomalies early, making it possible to plan repairs sooner and avoid costly outages. “HRM enables Duke Energy’s transmission group to implement more predictive maintenance, much like a modern automobile with onboard diagnostics that trigger specific maintenance actions. With this capability, we can move away from time-based activities and schedule work only as needed,” said Ben I. Harrison Jr., vice president for Transmission Engineering and Asset Management at Duke Energy.

Company executives say the application is on track to yield a return on investment in excess of 25% but note that they have about 30 months to go to reach the end of their projected 60-month payback period.

ENGIE – Winner, Order-to-Cash – Transforming Utility Operations Digitally, Powered by Digitate

ENGIE, the $60+ billion French utility provider, needed to reduce the number of errors in its accounts, including problems with incorrect invoicing, missed payment processing and inconsistent payment records – a tall order for a global company with 170,000 employees that serves 8.5+ million retail customers in its business-to-consumer unit alone.

Digitate, a SaaS-based autonomous enterprise software provider, deployed its ignio™ AI.ERPOps to enhance ENGIE’s automation capabilities for several key functions, including validation of meter reads, bill calculation, streamlining of payment postings and refunds, and blocking of erroneous late penalties and incorrect invoice amounts. Robotic processing automation was used whenever direct integrations such as application programming interfaces were not possible. Once ignio™ identifies a problem, it uses its mechanisms to reduce approximately 90% of the instances of that problem across the system.

The 18-month project paid for itself within the first month of its launch, and to date has delivered (€)4.2 million in revenue, a 95% reduction in issue resolution and automated handling of 150,000 bills daily with minimal disruptions. According to executives, implementing the new system has improved operations, lowered costs, and driven higher customer satisfaction and retention.

MTN Group – Winner, Source-to-Purchase – Predictive Procurement for Strategic Sourcing

Global Sourcing and Supply Chain (GSSC), the procurement arm of the MTN Group, Africa’s largest mobile network, knew it was leaving money on many different tables. With 10+ different ERPs and no synchronization between the local and group procurement units, they were missing many opportunities for volume and bundled discounts. In addition, a similar diffusion of procurement data meant that analysts were making many non-optimal sourcing decisions.

To solve these problems, the GSSC developed: GeSSICa, an AI-powered chatbot that stays informed by observing a variety of company data streams; robotics process analytics focused on 15 high-impact business processes; a recommendation engine looking for value leakage across the group; and a decision-support application steeped in game theory that supports combinatorial negotiations with other vendors in complex multi-unit tenders in part by simulating 50+ million negotiation scenarios.

These initiatives led to the automation of 15 important processes that reduced cycle time by 80% and automated 10 manual data preparation processes, reducing cycle time by 95%. So far, process automation has returned 130% return on investment, with manual task automation not far behind at 115%.

Pfizer – Winner, Hire-to-Rehire – Reimagining Talent Acquisition

Pfizer innovates every day to help make the world a healthier place. Recently, they set out to reimagine hiring and focused on unleashing the power of its people by simplifying tasks through design thinking, technology and cross functional collaboration.

The solution’s core is powered by HiredScore’s distinct recruiter and manager user interfaces. Recruiters are equipped with AI that provides real-time analysis and applicant prioritization based on job requirements. These insights have helped recruiters review applicants 65% faster. The AI-based Hiring Manager solution provides a simplified, connected experience accelerating candidate selection. HiredScore’s Talent Orchestration Layer seamlessly connects Pfizer technologies with two-way integrations and data flows, providing hiring teams more efficiency, including viewing fully integrated HireVue “On Demand” videos.

Embedded in both experiences is the ability to rapidly schedule interviews leveraging Paradox’s conversational AI assistant “Olivia.” Integrations with Pfizer systems enable almost complete automation for this once time-consuming task, reducing the time to schedule interviews by 80% and earning a 98% satisfaction rating.

The overall return on investment is an impressive 142%, based on hiring manager task hours saved. “The implementation of our Reimagine Recruitment transformation directly supports two of our key enterprise-wide objectives. First, to create room for our colleagues to do more meaningful work. Second, to make our work faster and easier using the latest in innovative digital technologies,” explained Domenica Askeland, vice president of Global Business Services Colleague Services at Pfizer.

About The Hackett Group

The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: HCKT) is an intellectual property-based strategic consultancy and leading enterprise benchmarking firm to global companies, offering digital transformation, including implementation of leading enterprise cloud applications, workflow automation and analytics that enable Digital World Class^™ performance.

Drawing from our unparalleled IP from nearly 20,000 benchmark studies with the world’s leading businesses – including 97% of the Dow Jones Industrials, 94% of the Fortune 100, 70% of the DAX 30 and 51% of the FTSE 100 – captured through our leading benchmarking platform, Quantum Leap^® and our Digital Transformation Platform (DTP), we accelerate best-practice implementations.

More information on The Hackett Group is available at: www.thehackettgroup.com, by emailing info@thehackettgroup.com, or by calling (770) 225-3600.

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

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