Diakonie Nord Nord Ost: Delivering efficient care and meaningful jobs with streamlined and automated procurement
Introducing end-to-end processes and best practices with SAP
Diakonie Nord Nord Ost provides social and healthcare services for people in need through 100 facilities including clinics, care homes, and social businesses with work opportunities for people with disabilities. Innovating with SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA Cloud solutions, the charity streamlines procurement and empowers staff, supporting its social mission.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Public Sector | Lübeck, Germany | 4,900 employees |
employees gain easy access to items they need
time saving in the booking process of supplier invoices via the business network
reduction in order times thanks to digital workflows
Head of Procurement, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost
Accelerating and simplifying procurement across 100 locations
Diakonie Nord Nord Ost is one of the largest social welfare organizations in the north of Germany. The Christian charity has a total annual budget of around €200 million to provide a very wide range of health, care, and educational services across the states of Schleswig-Holstein und Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Realizing the huge potential of digital transformation for its sector, the NGO has become an innovation leader, focused on using cutting-edge cloud solutions to maximize the impact it can make on society with its limited resources.
Bernd Springer, Applications Owner SAP at Diakonie Nord Nord Ost, explains: “The shortage of qualified staff is a real issue for us. That’s why we want to leverage technology as an enabler to automate tedious administrative tasks, so our employees can focus their valuable time on working with people. We offer services for all stages of life and want to empower our staff and volunteers to deliver the best possible care and support for everyone in every situation.”
What differentiates Diakonie Nord Nord Ost from other non-profit organizations is the broad range of industries and services it is involved in. Diakonie Nord Nord Ost offers care and support for homeless people and those living with addiction, daycare centers for children, mental health clinics for young people, work opportunities for people with disabilities in bakeries, cafes, hostels, on a sustainable farm, in a design agency with a print shop, and at a cultural and music events venue, as well as running care homes and assisted living spaces for the elderly.
The organization wanted to support all of these activities and businesses with centrally managed, streamlined, and user-friendly procurement processes.
Applications Owner SAP, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost
Implementing an integrated and automated e-procurement solution
After evaluating different options, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost selected SAP Ariba solutions to modernize its e-procurement. Working with SAP Services and Support, SAP Enterprise Support services, the SAP Procurement Product Team, and partner apsolut Group, the organization integrated SAP Ariba with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to enable automation from the order request through to payment and financial accounting.
By leveraging the SAP Ariba Snap Buying solution, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost benefitted from a preconfigured application based on best practices that accelerated the implementation. Another key success factor was the highly automated migration from the previous system. “As an experienced vendor and innovation partner, SAP understood the complexity of our end-to-end processes and helped us take advantage of established best practices,” says Bernd Springer. “Thanks to the realistic project management of partner apsolut Group, taking into account the unique challenges of cloud implementations, the collaboration was effective and we successfully reshaped our procurement.”
To build up new knowledge and expertise needed for an effective cloud journey, seamless interaction between the project team, the partner, and SAP Services and Support was key to ensuring a successful go-live of the new processes. By providing guidance and overcoming technical integration challenges, SAP Services and Support helped to establish a clear vision for the project that formed the foundation for the implementation. This vision also provides the framework for additional, gradual step-by-step improvements and continues to drive the adoption of the new workflows across the organization, improving daily operations at Diakonie Nord Nord Ost.
To further support rapid, widespread adoption of the new fully digital procurement processes, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost developed internal training programs. The organization focused on delivering flexible and engaging online training sessions, especially for the many new users who had never worked with SAP solutions before.
Head of Procurement, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost
Saving costs with impactful sourcing strategies
Today, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost has moved to highly automated, paperless digital workflows based on SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The organization has added more than 20,000 items to its procurement catalog. “We started with the most important categories and we’re gradually expanding the number of items that staff can purchase through SAP Ariba,” explains Annabel Rickert, Head of Procurement at Diakonie Nord Nord Ost. “It’s a modern solution that can handle everything from very simple, inexpensive high-volume purchases to highly complex orders. We have onboarded many employees who never used business applications before, and the feedback has been very positive. Our staff really like how fast and lean the new process is.”
The organization has fully automated manual processes, so employees no longer need to fill in paper or digital forms and send them around by email. An easy search feature, combined with curated lists for regular repeat purchases, help staff find every product quickly using the SAP Ariba guided buying capability. Integrated, dynamic, and mobile approval workflows speed up decision-making and ensure staff can work more productively. “This all adds up to a big time saving for everyone,” adds Bernd Springer. “Incomplete orders with missing information simply no longer exist, eliminating the need for time-consuming coordination between departments. And by including all staff, many people with disabilities working across the organization can gain new digital skills, helping them to fully participate in operational processes and everyday working life.”
In the past, it was often difficult to control and manage purchases effectively. Processes were slow and not clearly structured. With SAP Ariba, budget holders can now make smarter buying decisions and always see the current spend of their budget with an overview of the status of all the purchases. “We can now implement strategic sourcing initiatives more strictly and successfully, limiting so-called maverick buying across the organization to reduce costs and increase overall efficiency,” says Annabel Rickert. “As a result of better transparency, control, and analytics, we have already improved collaboration with our primary suppliers. And they benefit from the automation too, as payments are processed faster.”
Finally, the e-procurement solution delivers a fully automated end-to-end process from raising a purchase order at any of Diakonie Nord Nord Ost’s 100 facilities to the centralized booking and payment in the accounting application. “When an invoice arrives via SAP Business Network, the solution checks if there is a purchase order and if a delivery receipt has been registered as well,” confirms Stefanie Königs, Head of Department Finance and Accounting at Diakonie Nord Nord Ost. “And if everything matches, nobody needs to manually review or adjust anything in the accounting application, we instantly get real-time transparency into our financial performance.”
Head of Department Finance and Accounting, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost
Moving forward with intelligent AI features
Building on its achievements, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost plans to further optimize its sourcing by moving to fewer suppliers while negotiating better terms. The new SAP cloud solution provides a solid foundation to future-proof procurement processes with more intelligent and sustainable sourcing strategies, driven by AI-enhanced decisions based on personalized recommendations for example, for repeat orders with the SAP Ariba buying 360 capability.
The organization plans to integrate and automate more processes, including travel and expense management with SAP Concur solutions and more comprehensive supplier analytics with the SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and SAP Ariba Performance solutions. Additionally, Diakonie Nord Nord Ost aims to deepen its use of the SAP endorsed app Planon Real Estate Management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to improve its sustainable building management.
“By moving to SAP Ariba, we have made an important step,” concludes Bernd Springer. “This new solution will allow us to see the bigger picture and gain new insights into internal order flows between teams, departments, and businesses, helping us to boost the efficiency of the entire organization to provide even better services to the people who rely on us.”
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Featured partner
apsolut Group is a leading consultancy and SAP Gold Partner, helping businesses to transform digital procurement and increase efficiency. The company has been repeatedly recognized as SAP Ariba MEE Partner of the Year. With around 400 experts across 13 locations in 11 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, apsolut Group has delivered more than 3,000 successful projects to date.