How Deutsche Telekom Uses Celonis Process Mining to Save €66M in Procure-to-Pay

Deutsche Telekom Services Europe (DTSE) operates as the shared services center for Deutsche Telekom Group, processing over 2 million order items worth more than €7 billion annually and handling 9 million invoices per year. At that scale, even small inefficiencies in Procure-to-Pay processes compound into material financial losses — missed cash discounts, duplicate vendor payments, blocked invoices, and delivery accuracy issues that trigger contractual penalties.

Before Celonis, DTSE lacked real-time visibility into how its P2P processes were actually executing across SAP, SAP Ariba, Salesforce, and 10+ other source systems. Teams spent time on low-value transactional work rather than exception management. The organization couldn't systematically measure what percentage of invoices were being paid on time, what share of available cash discounts was being captured, or where duplicate payments were slipping through.

DTSE implemented the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform integrated with its full system landscape to create an end-to-end digital twin of its P2P operations. Process mining surfaces exactly where payment delays, compliance deviations, and accuracy failures are occurring. The platform powers a Center of Excellence for Process Mining that scales use cases across the organization — reaching 1,500 employees across 150 distinct use cases.

The financial results are among the most documented in enterprise process mining. €66M total savings achieved to date. Annual savings of €40M driven by a 96% cash discount capture rate — up from whatever the baseline was before Celonis made discount deadlines visible and actionable. On-time payment rate reached 90%+. Intelligent automation generated €12M in savings. Duplicate payment detection prevented €3M in losses. In 2019 alone, €1.6M in contractual penalties were recovered. Purchase order accuracy on first submission exceeded 90%.

Senior VP Peter Tasev articulated the long-term vision: a state where Celonis is the trigger for every system interaction, shifting from reactive transaction processing to algorithmic process orchestration.