Knock knock. Who's there? It's the Mindy Your Business Podcast with yet another episode, a show all about process mining data science and advanced business analytics. Jacob, how are we doing today? We're doing very well, Patrick, thank you. Max Abumann and Janis Nakka from NRV Group joined us on the podcast today to talk about how process mining is helping them solve critical problems in the energy sector. Maybe they will also mention how good we are as a company. Let's get right into it. What time is it? It's minding your business time. I hope you're excited because we sure are. Slowly, slowly, we are reaching another milestone in 40 released episodes and we are starting to eye that elusive 50 episode mark and you know, things are going very well in our end. So we are very excited about that. And I was thinking how is it even possible that in such a niche field, niche topics such process mining is. We can produce so much stuff and then I had it and it's not really us, but it's you guys. It's the process mining community and people such as guests of today's episode are making it happen for us that first and foremost, we always have some intriguing topics to discuss. But also because these people just keep entertaining and educating us in all things process mining. And there's just so many stories and so many people we could invite and you know, that just keeps us motivated and keeps us want to keep releasing these new episodes. So really good stuff. And that being said, please welcome a pair of process mining experts in Max Aberman and Janis Nake. Guys, welcome to our show. We are excited to have you. Thank you very much. We are pleased to be here. No, this is actually exciting because not only you guys work together for the same employer in NRV and in the same field of process mining. But you also seem to be, well, almost the exact same age. And you actually studied together at Farhoch Schuylä Ziedwestvalen. How did that happen? We, you could call it a university of applied sciences of source, Westphalia. If it's easier, maybe the listeners will then also be able to resemble it better. Actually, it is a cool story because we did not study at the same faculty of this university. So also in different towns. We didn't know each other before our process mining journey started. I am from Hagen also where the enemy group is and I was studying their economics and informatics. And Janis is from actually from Mönise. Pretty much. And he will know that place but it's really beautiful. I think he will also say it's like that. And he was studying their business administration with informatics. And our professors just asked us if we want to do a project because you need to do an internship at the end of your degree. And so that way we both came to the enemy group. So this project that you did, was it really just wondering here how you entered into the field of process mining. Was this project somehow related to business process management or process mining specifically or was it just a huge coincidence that you ended up in this field? Actually, it can be said that it was a coincidence because what we were looking for was just a practical pilot project. And we brought the broad knowledge of how to conduct such projects, also agile projects. Furthermore, we were into informatics but we were no process mining experts at that time. So we had to learn everything from scratch. So did you guys have some sort of idea what process mining was before? Did you start this project or did you just have to do a crash course somewhere online? In my case, actually I was working as an assistant student at my university and my boss at that time who was a scientific employee told me about this project and said they're doing process mining. It's really cool. If you want to just look at the load as maybe before and then you will be ready to go. Okay, I thought, okay, it seems cool, seems like a cool topic and I actually went on to do a salonist data engineer cause on their websites because they have those free lessons. And in my case, it was just really important for me. I saw some YouTube videos and I thought, but how does this data get into this form? Because it was more like a marketing video, what I saw on YouTube. And for me, as a technician, I just wanted to do, how do they get this data in this form? Where does it come from? Is it automatically extracted? What do I do? What will I do to have to do in the project actually? Yes, that's what that was a really important question for me. For me, it was the opposite. I had no clue about salonist, no clue about process mining because the former idea was that I will only do the project management but then a little bit got more into the technical details while being in the project. So listening to these parts of yours, we recently did an episode about how to become a process mining architect or how to even get the field of process mining. Was an interesting episode, has a lot of good feedback on it. But now would you be able to maybe give an advice for, let's say, people who are just at the beginning of their career on how to get to the field based on what you've been through, maybe some general recommendation? I think what is really important is the general interest of it, obviously in informatics but also in business in general because in probably every business lecture, at some point you will have business processes and in the end, companies just based on different kinds of processes and then with the technical understanding, the IT understanding, you are able to really grasp it really fast and understand how process mining in general works. But another suggestion that I have to make is that salonists is providing these online courses and to get a really broad and general understanding how it works, not into detail but in general how it works, these courses are really awesome. And I would also add, if you don't have a degree in informatics or have learned informatics and programming before, it's also not that big of a deal actually. Only because Janis and me have done it, it doesn't mean you have to have had this because we also are working with a girl who studied engineering and economics and only had like one module with informatics in her degree and she's also working with us doing automation with salonist process mining since over one year and it really likes it and is also good at what she's doing. So I think especially when using salonist process mining, it's really easy to get in. If you're interested in it, if you have fun analyzing processes, doing automation and everything else and if you just put the work in to the online courses and maybe have a real idea of a project, maybe some data from the internet, if you're not in the company or have an internship and just have fun with it, just play around and at some point you will be a good process miner. I think this is a really good lesson here that there is more than one path into process mining and you don't necessarily need to be an engineer or an IT person to actually correct this whole and get into it. However, moving on, so you currently work for a company called NRV. I guess it's probably good to also introduce the company, so could you tell us what NRV is actually doing? Yeah, NRV is an energy supplier in the west of Germany. It is a mid-sized company with a little bit more than a thousand employees. So maybe for the Salonist scale, it's pretty small and what we're doing at NRV is just the implementation of Salonist and also the further process automation. Maybe to go a little bit deeper into the field of energy supply because before Janus and I came to the NRV group, we didn't really know what they're actually doing and now we actually know they produce energy themselves and then put it to their customers, so sales of energy pretty much, they're trading energy on the market when we have too much or too little in that case. But we also own the net structure where the gas and water and everything goes to the customer and the meter at homes of the people is also in our control. So the really broad structure, everything that has to do with energy in our region is pretty much handled by us. So what is your exact current role at NRV, what do you guys do and is it from this project, this initial project that you guys had to do that you got there or how did you end up here? Exactly how you put it. So first opposition right now can be said as process mining lead at NRV group. So we are currently looking at all the processes and we are implementing all the processes. We have more salonist experts but they are not, they are just specialized and we are working for every single department. And how did we get there? So the pilot project that we have been talking about was in the procurement and at the end of a project. It was a very new approach to the company, it was a pilot project and also the way we conducted the project in an agile way was very new to the company. So therefore we had to present it to a boss and then we had to present it to all the bosses and then it went on until the very top of our company at that point they decided that it would be great to solve some issues in our power grid or in the nets with using process mining. All right. So essentially you guys came in with a pilot project process mining was non-existent and it went all the way up the food chain to the top level and now you guys are spearheading the process mining lead. 100%. That's very cool. One can also say in our first project we had a lot of freedom. We were the agile project managers. We were the operative project managers in that case but we also had the head of procurement who was like the product owner. He defined the product backlog with us and pretty much steered the project in the right direction together with us but he had the lead pretty much. And after that project as we came back as full time employees the freedom really increased as because they already knew we can be trusted and we were the experts on process mining in different departments and since then have shaped our own way, our own vision of doing process mining at the N.A.V. group. Of course which huge department will come next is a decision that not we make but the department and the board and all the important figures at N.A.V. group but we also can help with the decision and the end to the work together with process. Now this is very interesting that you were saying and that was that you bought the trust and what I find sometimes very challenging is actually to get exactly to this point that you buy the trust and that you persuade these people in your company that first of all process mining is interesting and actually can help them and second like get the ownership or get the sponsorship from from let's say the management. How did you do that and did you also experience any pushback from let's say more senior people who just looked at this with a little of concern or distrust and how did you get over this hump? I think which what was like maybe the key point here was that the employees especially the operator of employees were benefiting from or from our first implementation so much that they said when we did the qualitative interviews for a bachelor thesis that they said they could not work anymore without process mining as long process mining and the way we implemented it so therefore this was already crucial and on the other hand if you're able to solve problems fast in a way that it's also sheep at the same time. This is probably already enough to make the decision. I mean that's the perfect combination right? You have the business users being on board from right away and you're solving major issues that is worth the investment of setting up the tool right so that's the one of the biggest things that you need to do and yeah go on please. I'm sorry and to add to the question of Jakob it's one has to take into account that it's not always easy to convince people of the process mining solutions in your company because the typical scenario that you will meet or encounter pretty much yeah 100% at some point is that you meet people that say I have SAP I know everything about my SAP system I'm an expert in that field why do I need this tool I can also get I can already get all the knowledge that you can get from a process mining solution and implementation that I already at that point in 10 minutes yes why should I implement a new tool most of the time they will still help you implement it but they if you don't convince them and have good change management you won't get them to use the tool actually but it's not the it's rather it's rather seldom that we have this problem most of the time if you have a good process mining implementation the people will be really really glad to have the tool because you have to you know that not everybody in in a company is an SAP expert most of people will really profit from a from a easy and fast way to to analyze that data yeah that was going to be my question because it seems that there was a lot of enthusiasm from the get go and I know I can speak for Jacob that we have built a lot of solutions over the years and if the response can be tepid right so very lackluster and people just don't care so how do you how do you really engage your your users to use the tool how do you generate enthusiasm for what you're doing is that something that the users are automatically just found out or did you have to do something extra you you mentioned good change management can you talk about that for sure so while implementing the processes we already figure out a lot of pains that or colleagues have among pains in the process itself and pains that are in most cases easy to solve with process mining so what we're generally doing is that while implementing a new process we are already looking for some solutions that we can deliver but that our colleagues don't know that we will deliver them so at one point we will invite them into the sillowness for the first time we will teach them how to use it which is very important for us is that we do it one or one so usually we help them steering it and in a second point then we present a solution to it and they just got a solution for an issue they had for years without even asking for the solution and at that point the enthusiasm starts and another point of the change management what we're also doing is that we are providing this basis to to have discussions on the process without I think I'm pointing at some which also very benefit of beneficial yeah very very very well said this pointing to someone I also noticed that sometimes there is some pushback from the people responsible for the process because you're confronting them with the reality of how the process is actually running and I was just having this example today in my head if somebody was measuring how I work on my computer how much time I spend in my emails how much time I spend on Facebook each day and then told me okay so here is like a 40% potential for improvement I would be like let me live just let me leave me alone while if you actually don't point this out you know about it but you say okay if you do this you will improve that part and that's that's crucial and I really like this approach moving on actually you you said that you are currently like spearheading the initiative of process mining and what we usually call it in process mining communities that you create the center of excellence is this also how you run things in NRV and maybe if you could tell us a bit more in general way how you are running the show currently in our case actually it's pretty much a center of excellence in in the NRV group it's called the center of competence where Janis and me are placed it's not a real division it's rather imaginary but the people actually meet up and talk about the digitalization of different processes in the company and in that case only Janis and me and our new colleagues who are doing automation for us are are from the sillowness department that pretty much Janis and me are having an agile approach where we work on different projects at the same time meet up on Mondays to have a check in and think about the most important topics for the week and have recurring events like like true fixes with with every department every week or every two weeks where we discuss with the domain experts what are current developments how are how are our KPIs going are we are we getting better are we getting worse do we have new important topics which are coming from our domain experts which have to be handled maybe new analysis needed new KPIs needed for the management and everything else and we discuss that and based on that we prioritize all the tasks we have and work on it in a two two guys tech tech team matter I think actually now four people with automation and what is really important that case that we can also at some time help get help from process and to to manage all the project that we have at the same time because it's not that easy if you have so much departments with not much manpower so you mentioned in the center of competence that it's a digitalization of processes so I'm assuming that the process mining aspect is only a part of it or is so what other things are you looking at are these projects or initiatives more mature did was it also spearheaded alongside process mining or what what's the setup there so actually the competent center for digitalization started with three pilot projects one was it was I think in 2018 when was just digitalization of documents using a nice documentation document management software on the other hand we had robotic process automation and then the last topic we had was process mining which was also the pilot project that we did in our bachelor thesis and this was the early stage of this center of excellence and right now all the pilot projects were implemented or decided to cancel them in the future and currently we are evolving into new projects or we have already involved into new projects but so far there has only been like a real constant and that was Salonus using process mining yeah yeah the other projects are more timely timely based so like a generic generic workflow solution from for several departments or a digital way to sign documents so rather smaller projects which are also really important but not like a huge Salonus execution management system in our case you guys also mentioned that you are working with implementation partners and it's you know processing so that's that's a very good ad however it's not intended if you could tell us a little or for other companies and other business users that might be listening to the podcast what advice would you generally give into outsourcing of some of the stuff that you need to develop and do you also are trying to balance things and also like get your own experts on process mining so that you manage most things in house or how do you go about how do you go about that I think it can be said that we always have the same approach so in the beginning we do the implementation nearly 100% with our implementation partner in this case process end and then after the implementation the first implementation is done the validation is pretty much the part where we step we all of course we also help the implementation partners within the process implementation in order to deliver the answers very fast to the questions they have in order to have a proper implementation but we start we pretty much step into the process in the validation point and then there we have a very close close way of communicating with our implementator in order to solve issues very fast and efficient and we also try to cut like the iterations until we give feedback I think in the case of the end of a group the critical success factor or in all cases I would assume is that you have in-house competencies for digital solutions so it's really important that people in your company actually know how the software works can make subtle changes little changes or maybe bigger bigger changes because in the end you don't want the management won't want that do you have suppliers working for you all the time you don't want the procurement to get new new I don't know how best to purchase this purchase orders created every week for for more manpower by suppliers you want a good balance between work in your own company know how in your own company that way it's not lost and helping with our in-house know-how is also so we are in the interface so we can help the domain experts to not have spend as much not have to spend as much time on the process mining implementation because time is the resource that they're lacking on the most if they if they need process mining to improve their processes actually so we help these guys and we also have for help process and by delivering the information in the form that is technically easier to implement than domain experts who don't have as much competencies in the data science field this is a very very interesting point my question was going to be how awesome are we as a cut no I'm joking but like and my question is going to be if you know you have experience working with implementation partners what advice would you give to other companies doing the same thing how does best set up that cooperation right because there's some requirements that need to be met and there's internal things that need to happen at the company so that the implementation partner gets the most out of the time spent with the company right so what advice would you give how to best prepare a company to work with an implementation partner so when first starting of course you need to have the key key employees at the right position so for sure you need someone that is able to deliver the IT information regarding for example the SAP or how SAP is running in the company but on the other hand you also need like domain experts that understand technically what we want to achieve through process mining and then you need someone in our case it is Max and me that is able to kind of translate efficiently the requests of the domain experts and what is also important is that the for example send of excellence can be seen as a constant in the corporation a constant that is not switching so it's not possible that for example within a project the employees of the syntax of excellence change if the employees of the implementation partner change that is not a big of an issue but you have to have someone you can always rely on you can always ask the questions to and to add to that point I think the most important point is communication because it's it's it's really important that the implementation partner and the company are constantly talking to each other what's the how far are you with the implementation what problems are there we have new requirements just just just on the fast route I think that's important because otherwise the implementator implementer could build something and then it's finished after one month and nobody talked to each other and it's not what the domain experts actually wanted or the domain experts did not work with Stallone is enough to actually understand what can also be done and how could can it be done done otherwise and that's a setup for not not for failure but for not such a good project in the end yeah talking is the key that's with another and every other relationship guys moving on let's get a little specific so could you tell us what kind of processes so far you've implemented and since we know a little where we're going to head we will then focus on one specific yes it's already really really many processes actually so we started with purchase to pay and accounts payable I'll just list them first and then we can go into detail in in in in some of them and after that we started to look at the meter to cash process for net net provider I think it's called in English and after that we started to look at our sales department and in that case the the analysis of open open I'm sorry what is fodrome called in English requirements yeah so so we we sent an invoice to our customer and he has to pay it so if they don't pay it it's open okay so monitor monitoring our the money that we need to get from our customers actually if you put it conceivable accounts receivable that's yes that's the one thank you very much and we also started to look at our controlling process so budget planning for the for the departments which is actually not as easy in SAP if you're not working often with it and I think we will also have a lot of success with that one and I don't know we that are really many processes in which one do we really want to go into into how much detail well I mean I was going to ask I mean it sounds like your your process mining is fairly extensive you're looking at a lot of processes and what was the rollout like and what was the time it took to implement each process was it all at once or how did you structure it so like we we told before the first process was the pilot process of the procurement and at the same time we also did the accounts paper this was just because the head of procurement was is very innovative and he said he wants to digitalize his his job and then the second from that point on we started to go there where big issues are the biggest so especially in the grid we can say that it is pretty hard to always keep up to date because there are certain regulatory like regulatory approaches that you have to fit and they there are new regulations that you have to follow every single year and at the same time we also have a head on SAP migration and every listener that had an SAP migration might know that this causes some issues sometimes some so this is where we went and afterwards we continued with or against receivable probably because it's also one of our cash costs of the company yeah and to add to that how how much time did we need for those implementations so we started with procurement and and accounting and did the basic implementation in five months after that we wrote our best of thesis for three months so we weren't working at the end of the group but we also assisted at steering in our next projects which is the most the most yeah which is the best to start after our the start of our actual employment and that was the net and we are working with the net or our grid provider since april last year so more than a year now and there's no end inside we have much use cases in our backlog much of important topics so it will go on forever maybe I don't know yet and with our accounts receivable process we started actually last year August around that time in that case we have to say it is it was much more complex than we saw and we had really big problems implemented it so not every process is it's easy to implement because SAP logic is sometimes strange or and sometimes totally not understandable but we did it actually and we can now say if a position in our system is actually cleared or open so that was the most important thing for for the use case and we actually implemented that so like six months from from from now or seven actually but the project is still running and we also have some more use cases in the pipeline and for controlling in that case Janis and me did not assist much in that case because pros and did everything like in a month and then it was pretty much ready and at the moment we are validating with with the domain experts so that one was really really fast yeah one thing that we need to mention is the processes are running that long because the first implementation is very fast usually within a few months and then the process of change management starts and the change management is way harder than the actual technical implementation yeah except for the last project that Max just mentioned there was implementation also very hard because we had two source systems two SAP systems that we have been technically combining that were using different logics and to get both of them on the same side was pretty tough and to add to that we were also looking at positions at invoices starting from 1999 and once a step and starting from 2004 and the other system so yeah things change over the time and it's not that easy to look at 30 million positions or more or actually it's 70 million at that moment in our loneliness if you click on the dashboard yeah that's that's quite a big data scope you have there and that kind of leads me to my next question I mean with all these different processes that you're implementing all these different views and KPIs that you need to calculate is the data pipeline an issue for you guys was this ever a concern you kind of mentioned adding two source systems and that kind of causes some issues is how how is that handled so if you mean data pipeline you mean problems with the extraction and everything getting all that data into the system so yeah actually it happens that some data lots fail or some extractions fail that that is a huge point why we are currently thinking about going from extraction one times a night to real-time extract to make it on the one hand more usable for operative employees who are looking at cases and then working on them lifetime and they also want to see that the case is finished like some minutes afterwards and not on the next day and another point is that it will make it way more secure if we just load smaller chunks every other every other hour or every other minute than loading everything overnight and we have made the we have actually had the case that two times it failed and like the last month or two in our meter to catch process the data load failed and one operative employee just just right away contacted Janis and what is going on I don't see my my problematic cases in my actual engine inbox how do I work now I don't want to go back to the all-time so it's really important for us that the data pipeline is in check and everything works as it should so that's a that's a huge point when doing process binding to set that up correctly and and have it in a secure way. So one of the processes that really caught my attention was meter to catch which I think is very I would say unique or specific for energy industry could you explain to our listeners what meter to catch is and what are some of the specific problems and maybe use cases you're trying to solve there. So the main point in our meter to catch process project was process transparency and what is the process really about so as it says meter to catch we have a meter which is placed at the home of one of our customers or at an industry plant of one of our customers in that case there are different kinds of meters so you can he have a meter which is which is counting the energy that you that you consume or the gas that you consume but we also have customers who have solar panels on their on their roofs and produce actually energy and put it into our net so at some time we get money from them at some time we actually pay them money for their for their energy supply but in that case we don't do that all by ourselves but we have to communicate with the with the energy supplier because and then in the meter to catch process we only looking at our grid and therefore we only get money for the use of the grid from our suppliers so it's it's different market roles in that case and then if we come back to the basic project a process we have a meter at home or at a plant we need to read the values on that meter so how much energy was consumed or produced get that into our SAP system it is it is stored in a meter reading document and after that we go into the process of market communication so we need to provide the energy the energy values the measures that we that we got from the from the meter to our supplier he has to answer to that to the message in a different in a special kind of way that those are the regulations that Janis was talking about the so the communication is really just you have to send a specific segment in a specific form and if it's technically wrong you get a you get an error message and everything else there are lots of messages sent to different suppliers every day from us and many responses we get back in that case and if all those processes with with those messages go right we can actually produce what is called a net snutsungsabrechnung in German it's the the invoice that we create for for the usage of the net that we send to our supply because he has used the net and after that the invoice just gets cleared and we get the cash in that case so from meter to cash before you go into use cases I have one very specific question before because before I worked with a business data I worked with meter data because my past career I worked in Siemens and building technology division and I know that the biggest problem was always to get the data from the meters at the customer side to to your data because you know you have a meter somewhere in the area where there's not even an internet and you are relying on like Bluetooth and sending data somewhere in through the air is the data in consensus in consistency an issue for you guys so we have to we have to differentiate in that case because our the process that we are looking at we don't have many smart meters who actually send the data automatically till now the process of changing to smart meters in a lot of cases is actually going on right now and we are also assisting with solonus because we have some data problems on specific cases and we have to have the perfect data set up set up before we can change to smart meters but that's a different different story in the book in that case because normally if we have a meter at home our system actually now also solonus what was beforehand done by an employee of the department solonus classifies whether the meter is going to be read by an employee of us which goes there and just looks at the value or if we send a cart per post post post post mail it is post per mail okay I'm sorry for that a per mail and the person reads the meter by by the by themselves and sends it back to us per mail per app per or per mail again and in that case we get the data like how it is seen on the meter but you can understand that not everybody will answer our mail and not everybody will will let us into their house and that's a huge problem because if we cannot measure the the value of them on the meter we have to approximate it so the S&P system makes an approximation but there are many ways and many problems which can block an approximation though in that case a meter reading document can stay not filled which is problematic because if we don't have any values we don't we can't actually place an invoice and can't get the cash in our meter to cash process and further problem with that yeah it is it is creating a lot of rework so if we approximate the values from the customer then there's a possibility that the customer is coming back at us and saying excuse me I had like 0.001 megawatt a kilowatts less consumed and then the entire system has to be changed the entire data in the S&P system has to be changed and the process is starting from scratch and obviously we want to lower the rates of approximations even though it can help in scenarios where we are not able to read the meter so as someone who has ignored many males and has not been home to let people into read the meters I apologize I didn't know this was such a big problem I will be sure to be better in the future but my question was going to be if you look at this meter to cash process what is what are the immediate problems in it that you're trying to solve with process money I think what is very important is the market communication so everything is regulated by the German government and also by the EU and therefore the communication has to be on point so an immediate issue that we have all the time or that every single energy provider has all the time is that the communication is for some reason going wrong that can be on one hand because the meter reading reading didn't work that can be because metadata change and also because physical meters don't work anymore so this is probably the biggest issue to communicate in a appropriate way based on a good database and you can imagine if we are sending several thousands of messages out and getting several thousands of answers every day we can't have as much employees who look at the all those messages sent or received so we have to have a really good SAP system a really good automation in the SAP system to not only send the message in the correct format and receive and read the messages in the correct format but to also handle some of the problems that can happen if a problem is actually there in the process so we built up a monitor which analyzes those different categories of messages and a possibility to prioritize the cases that are problematic because we also as we started working on that on that topic with our with our net department we had cases and problematic cases in communication which have gone back to 2016 and 17 so that we really old and if we couldn't place an invoice in the year 16 or 17 we also cannot place an invoice in 18 19 20 20 20 22 because there's a root problem some years ago and and you can imagine how important a prioritization in that case is for the employees that are not much not many actually to work on all those problems which have stacked up over the years but to spoil a little bit we are on a really good way and the problems have minimized a lot in that case so you're saying minimized and my question would be did you or you then were able to actually solve some of these issues were you also able to quantify it let's say like how much you improve certain parts and what those parts where of course we are but I think this is too critical information I see but what can be said first of all for all the listeners to understand how many customers are on our grid we have around 400,000 customers on our grid every single day being supplied by our grid and this will also increase a lot in this the coming year okay and that case I would also add information type that is not really critical I think if we if we don't work with absolute values but with relative values and one can say that we have more than half or actually in the last month we have only left a 10th one 10th of the problems with in the communication and the number of missing invoices which have needed to be created was also more than halved so and in that case you can also imagine every month we have to create new invoices so it's not a number that we say we are missing x number of invoices now let's work on those but because every day there are new invoices which have to be created and we have to work against time pretty much like working against the wave of new new problems arising and we are having a really good positive trend and that that that makes us really happy and our domain experts also sounds awesome and I just want to say congratulations because you know when you start giving these results it's very easy to buy yourself more into into process mining and this is exactly why process mining exists anyhow I also talk to a colleague of mine who was supporting you on some of the implementations and she told me that you actually were building this this thing that you call an Arizona can you can you tell us what's up with that of course for sure so when we were in our pilot project in the procurement we have figured out so we did this classical process mining where in the process are the issues created and in the end a very logical answer of this was that the in the beginning of the process where all the employees of the anniversary group order something a lot of mistakes were made or are generally made and this is not because our colleagues don't know how okay sometimes they don't know how to use it but it's also because the SAP is very complicated and there are many sources where you can make issues and therefore we created a vision in the end of a project that we would like to take our colleagues out of the beginning of process so we would like to create a platform that is like amazon you just give a name or something you need something you need natrium you just put natrium and then you get like the possible suppliers that you can choose and when you put on it you don't have to enter all your data every single time but the system already knows who you are because you have ordered it two years ago based on and this was the vision that we have created and based on that we got two new employees that wrote their bachelor thesis on this and what they did is they would take the existing process and take the historic data that we have within our cloud and then build a business view in cell owners that would allow to just search for something that was bought in the past and then directly just by it's basically two clicks so you put in the name and you click on the object that you want to have and then you click on audit and then it would already directly order something within our life SAP system how so that means that you are basically executing a certain transaction through cell owners implementation in SAP yes exactly if we go into details by using rfc and barbie calls which which are used to create a purchase order in that case and the all the irrelevant data has gotten from cell owners and written in the correct fields and thereby purchase order in that case for example is created sounds very cool no all right guys what's in the future for you but it comes to process mining and all of these initiatives that you're running actually a lot so our yeah doesn't we if we could work yeah it would be nice if there were more of us actually in that case because we can't work on all the stuff that we want to but we but we have a huge plan actually we the great the great picture consists of automating more we have a lot of repetitive tasks in our at the nv group which are yeah hindering our colleagues from doing the actual valuable tasks in in their job and and and they need that time and we're assisting with cell owners but we've only built some automations we are really sure that there's a lot of potential left at the at the company to automate a further point is this establishing this culture of continuous improvement even more because we have our departments looking at their at their KPIs at their performance every week they talk to each other how it developed how happy they are it's actually helping what they're doing at that moment so this culture is already established in lots of lots of parts of the group of the nv group but we will assist to to to bring it even further and a different point is also that we want to yeah implement more processes actually because we've only looked at some major process there some other left that we can address in future so that's a huge point another point so it will be eight point that I'm talking about because we just presented this this this great picture on Tuesday actually to the to the high figures of the nv group to the bottom to the board yes point number four is actually the establishment which is an idea of us or our boss pretty much the establishment of a cash cash flow liquidity management system working capital management system so we are looking at the different yannis you're looking interesting I'm sorry we're we are looking at different data from different departments in our in our company and just look how how liquidity is going in the different points where we can access that data so how much open open not clear positions we have it's like it can be said that we are looking to create cash flow management that is real time so in every single second the company knows exactly how much money is existing and I think this sounds not that crazy but it's actually a huge step because then we can steer more precisely how we spend our money and since we are trading a lot of energy which is a lot of money that has has to be used and a lot of liquidity that is needed and this can be very very valuable for us and yeah sorry I interrupted no problem thank you for the clarification at that point so it's pretty much the the the the the voyage to the saloon is EMS so execution management system we take data from our sales department we take data from our net department we take data from our accounting and combine it in a management dashboard or for the people who are actually working on liquidity management and have it all in one place not in several SAP systems not in 10 reports who have to be executed the whole night but just access it and look at it at the numbers which are correctly fine and that will be a huge huge deal if we actually do it in some at some point it's a really ambitious task but we are on a really good way in that case yeah so maybe Janice you you want to follow up on the other points of the great picture in that case I think another thing that we haven't been talking about is is that we want to steer our sustainability in the company by using process mining and we have already created the transparency and within the procurement department buying combining or procurement data with sustainability data so we know exactly how much CO2 we are currently emitting by buying products and here's the great picture that we don't want only want to know how much we are producing but we also want to steer the behavior of the operator procures in order to decrease or CO2 emissions in the supply chain before we buy the product and of course at that point we are only using estimations at that point which are pretty good but are not not ready for the actual steering of the of the procurement department so we have to enrich those that data even more but I think that's also a good point for the usage of saloon as an EMS in that case because we have gotten a different system where the CO2 was shown to us on a dashboard and our head of procurement which is set in not with us anymore but the new head of procurement is also really a really cool guy so he did no just to precisely formulate it he did not die but he changed. Okay I'm sorry in English that's that's I should not use that anymore in that case okay I will remember so he's not working with us anymore at the NFV group but he had this idea why do we need two systems we have saloon is saloon is great our procurement employees need to have that's CO2 data also in saloon is and process and process and help us to implement these these kind of data also in our process. That sounds very cool guys I mean I am a little jealous of having that much of a freedom to work on this because you know we are still consultants we are usually limited by the budget we can give ideas we can work on different stuff but we are always somehow restricted and just listening to you and hearing this this ambition and excitement makes me feel very very happy for you yeah so I guess we will have to invite you back in a couple of years to hear how that go yeah for sure thank you so much it would be really nice anyhow where can people find you if they had at some point some question or would like to also hear from you where can they get in touch I think the best point is LinkedIn yes where you can just add us send us direct messages obviously you can also send us mails I don't know if you can link them below we'll try that's probably the best yes or maybe if you can't Janis Nakhir Max Alman again Alman was only one and so that's an important factor actually which creates a lot of confusion sometimes we will we will try to put it into the episode description anyhow guys it's been a pleasure talking to you I'm very happy that our colleagues who actually worked on the project told us about you and got us connected because this has been a real pleasure so thank you for coming thank you very much for having us here yeah thank you dear listeners thank you for listening as always you can also write us an email in your own LinkedIn where we are very active so just drop us a message on mining your business profile or you can just write us an email on mining your business
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