Siemens Energy Strengthens Operational Community with a Centralized Portfolio Platform

Siemens Energy is one of the world’s leading energy technology companies. The company works with its customers and partners on energy systems for the future, thus supporting the transition to a more sustainable world. With its portfolio of products, solutions and services, Siemens Energy covers almost the entire energy value chain – from power generation and transmission to storage. The portfolio includes conventional and renewable energy technology, such as gas and steam turbines, hybrid power plants operated with hydrogen, and power generators and transformers. More than 50 percent of the portfolio has already been decarbonized. A majority stake in the listed company Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE) makes Siemens Energy a global market leader for renewable energies. An estimated one-sixth of the electricity generated worldwide is based on technologies from Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy employs 91,000 people worldwide in more than 90 countries and generated revenue of around €29 billion in fiscal year 2019.

Siemens Energy is a multinational organization, one which provides a wide range of products and services across the full energy production spectrum. As such, their client operations are complex and involve many departments in different areas of the globe. Being a well-establish organization with a long history, the sheer scale of their business added to the complexity inherent in their operations, with thousands of project managers globally working on a multitude of project types.

Each team within Siemens Energy was using their own systems and their own processes to manage their work. Teams often worked in a dis-jointed and siloed way. This resulted in a lack of operational standards and extensive tool proliferation which caused inefficiencies in project & work management, customer & employee frustration, and issues with keeping accurate & timely portfolio level reports.

Individual Project Managers were spending a significant amount of their workday navigating through a variety of different systems to find routine project information. Because there was no centralized system, project statuses were being tracked & communicated manually through emails, texts phone calls. Often, getting a simple project status update would be an arduous and lengthy process. The amount of time lost per PM by managing projects in this siloed & manual way was causing a project back-log & ultimately was costing the business lost revenue in potential new projects, as well as emotional turmoil.

Management at Siemens Energy identified a need to improve the overall customer experience. To improve customer satisfaction, Siemens Energy needed to improve their service delivery competency, the effectiveness of planning and the speed at which they could respond to customer requests & inquiries.

When we looked at our operations landscape and found that everybody had different databases, spreadsheets & tools for project management. A customer would ask us for updates and providing an answer quickly was quite difficult. That’s one of the gaps we closed by obtaining a single platform across the business. All that information is in one place and it is now our source of truth.” – Andy Watson, Director of Digital Operations

Siemens Energy decided it was time to standardize, harmonize and consolidate all client operations onto a single Collaborative Work Management platform. This initiative is called “OnePM” and it is more than a simple IT project, it is an enterprise-wide business transformation project. It would become the single source of truth for the operational community within Siemens Energy; project managers, field operators, back-office teams, and other support staff. A major goal for the OnePM initiative was to increase the productivity of individual Project Managers. IT would do this in several ways, but first and foremost would simply be by consolidating multiple tools & processes into one. This would allow PMs to communicate better, find & share answers faster and spend less of their time on administrivia, instead spending their time on project planning & delivery. Another primary objective for OnePM was to increase visibility across all levels of the project portfolio, starting from the minute details of specific tasks, all the way up to project statuses and portfolio health. In addition to gaining that deeper visibility, they would also make it available to a broader audience within Siemens Energy.

• Better, more thorough reports, provided in real time
• Increased revenue by completing more client projects each year
• Consolidated an average of 5 systems per department
• Increased customer satisfaction
• 36,000 work hours saved annually

The vision for Siemens was to have a central system where PM’s could access and review project hotspots, to do’s and prioritize with ease and accuracy. With the OnePM initiative this has been achieved and powered by AdaptiveWork’s enterprise work management software. With more than a $1BN worth of activity already being represented in AdaptiveWork, the results are already being seen with reduction in costs and time saved. Significant improvements have also been made in portfolio reporting as well as automating administrative tasks. Having already smashed through the target of saving 1hr per month per PM, the feeling is that this initiative has only scratched the surface on what can be achieved with OnePM and ultimately on the road to making Siemens Energy a ‘best in class’ project management organization.