Turkcell Enhances Efficiency and ROI with Ultimus BPM Suite

Back in 1994, Turkcell introduced mobile communications to Turkey, which led them to become the leading GSM operator in the country today. With revenue of over €3.97 billion ($5.5 billion) in 2010, and more than 34 million subscribers, Turkcell is not only the leading operator in Turkey, but also the third largest GSM operator in Europe. Turkcell also provides GSM services internationally and was the first Turkish company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Turkcell's primary objective for their decision to automate their corporate business processes was to increase the efficiency of the key processes and thereby leverage the overall satisfaction of both employees and customers.

The telecommunication industry is one of the most dynamic industries in the world. GSM operators around the globe are continuously required to adapt their business models and processes to a very competitive marketplace. Turkcell aspired to become the most dynamic company in the industry by looking at ways to improve customer service, increase the productivity levels of their resources, and enhance the efficiency of their business processes. They were determined to introduce a business process management system and decided on the Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite, which would help them to become more responsive through shorter cycle times, and enable them to quickly adapt their processes to the changing market. With the Ultimus BPM Suite, their goal was to improve competitive advantage while simultaneously enhancing their ROI. One of the major issues faced by highly dynamic companies is the continuous change in the organigram. Secondly, corporate processes need to be dynamically linked to other corporate IT systems, feeding and receiving data from them as the processes require.

By collaborating with Tepum Sigma Software House, Ultimus’ award-winning partner in Turkey, Turkcell was able to automate 28 key business processes so far; among them are processes for Human Resources, Finance, Customer Service, and Service and Product Development. The highly complex Purchasing Process was implemented to improve efficiency of the finance processes. After the initial purchase information has been entered and documents have been attached, the incident proceeds to the step where the budget details are evaluated. Within Turkcell, there are nine hierarchy levels with different approval rights, depending on the respective purchase request. If the purchasing category is subject to various approval limits, a senior manager is activated to approve or disapprove the request. When the approval steps are finished, the incident proceeds to the purchasing pool. A person responsible for purchasing then either activates a purchase order form for the vendor from the integrated ERP system, or checks availability of the requested item in the inventory. With the automation of the Purchasing Process, Turkcell abandoned paper forms, thus eliminating potential errors associated with them. In addition, the efficiency of the process has increased dramatically which resulted in significant cost and time benefits. The Service and Product Development Process is Turkcell’s most important process. It involves the suggestion, analysis, development and testing of new products and services. After submitting a product or service suggestion, it is approved by a supervisor of the initiator and sent to the Business Analysis Group. If the request is approved by the group, a description of the request, production deadline and business analysis documents are created. Once the business analysis has finished, the development centers or other operational groups get involved for the technical analysis. Then, project teams are created requesting departmental heads to appoint qualified staff, who then develop and test the product or service. After completion of the testing phase, the product can go into production. Besides being able to track the process and alert employees of delays through email or SMS, everyone involved in the process can run reports, add documents and adapt the process, which makes the Ultimus platform a truly human-centric BPM system. Consequently, the Service and Product Development Process is a collaborative effort of people and systems.

• With Ultimus BPM, Turkcell was able to abandon all paper forms, thus eliminating all problems and potential errors associated with them and eventually resulting in quality improvements in products and services.
• Turkcell’s management teams can now assess the efficiency of the corporate processes, pinpoint the bottlenecks and redesign the process accordingly - and in real time.
• As the automated processes have become transparent, quality assurance can permanently monitor the process to identify points of improvement.
• The inherent escalation management in Ultimus BPM guarantees for efficient process completion resulting in overall effectiveness and increased people and system productivity.
• Seamless integration with Turkcell’s IT infrastructure allows for quick moving of all corporate processes onto the Ultimus BPM platform.

• Turkcell has reduced the cycle times of their processes by 88% resulting in significant time and cost benefits.
• Turkcell was able to significantly reduce the cycle times of their core business processes from an average of 65 minutes per incident to 8 minutes.
• In financial terms, this currently equates to an annual Return on Investment of approximately 1,000,000 Euro ($1,275,000 USD).