Telekom enters a new era of planning with Jedox

Previously, Telekom Deutschland relied primarily on Excel for its planning processes. Hundreds of planners created detailed operational plans and financial forecasts across several hundred individual Excel files. While this method worked, it was resource-intensive and lacked transparency. As a response, Telekom Deutschland launched the strategic “Digital Planning” project in 2022 to introduce a new, integrated planning platform.

During its software evaluation process, Telekom Deutschland took a methodical, comprehensive approach. Around 30 Finance team members from various departments were involved as the key users in a multi-stage vendor selection process.

After evaluating several providers, Telekom decided to implement Jedox. The decisive factors for choosing Jedox were the software’s ease of use and its close integration with Excel. The Telekom Finance team also prioritized high system performance, flexibility in planning model design, and the no-code environment—which allowed the Finance team to build and operate their solution with autonomy.

Instead of a top-down implementation, the “Digital Planning” project pursued a bottom-up strategy. Furthermore, the transition from Excel to Jedox was largely left to the discretion of the planners.

Deliberately, no initial specifications for data model structures are imposed. Instead, the Telekom controllers and modelers independently created the models they needed within Jedox. The central project team then consolidated similar master data in the next step and provided it as a standard for the future.

During this transition period, Excel and Jedox were used in parallel and Jedox’s Excel integration provided the flexibility needed to create simple transitions between the systems and process. For example, follow-up processes of Jedox planning can be managed via the Jedox Excel Add-in, or data from Excel can easily be imported into Jedox.

In terms of data management, the project team was responsible for identifying central upstream systems and setting up interfaces with necessary data sources. Additionally, Telekom departments had the option to automatically upload Excel and CSV files into Jedox if no interface currently exists.

The existing forecasting and planning process, which is gradually being revised and digitized, includes various planning horizons—from strategic long-term planning to in-year forecasting. Simultaneously, a monthly rolling projection process exists for managing economic development on a short-term basis.

This rolling projection was implemented as the first use case in Jedox and included the complete profit and loss (P&L) statement. It was relatively simple to implement and represented an initial “quick win” in the project. After the rolling forecast, the sales volume planning was implemented as the first operational planning process in Jedox.

The bottom-up strategy with Jedox has proven to be a resounding success. By June 2024, 500 users had registered in Jedox—doubling the number of users since the beginning of 2024. As of now, 25 use cases are live, and 25 more are in progress.

Susanne Neubauer, the project leader of Digital Planning, remarked: “The momentum of Jedox is working. We are constantly receiving new requests from teams who want to work with Jedox.” The benefits of standardization and automation quickly became tangible, with Neubauer noting: “We’ve achieved a significant leap in efficiency through Jedox, as the database-driven platform eliminates the need for manual information transfers. Planning processes are significantly accelerated through workflow-driven methods.”

Planners have gained full transparency into the status of their plans, and administrative effort is greatly reduced. The teams are also enthusiastic about the automation potential of the Jedox Integrator and the high performance of data calculations and transformations. Another key advantage is the ability to implement short-term changes to planning parameters in the central data models quickly and easily.

Telekom Deutschland will continue to digitalize its corporate planning step by step. Starting in 2025, the agenda includes the full integration of use cases. In this phase, AI-driven forecasting methods will move beyond proof-of-concept experiments that have shown promising results, transitioning to large-scale implementation to further support planners in generating accurate forecasts.

“Jedox is the tool that our Finance team wants to work with. In an extensive software selection process with many providers, they chose Jedox as the planning solution.”

Susanne Neubauer, Product Owner Digital Planning, Telekom Deutschland GmbH