Project Summary

Telefónica, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies with operations in 14 countries and over 113 million customers, launched an enterprise-wide process automation initiative in 2018. Facing margin pressure, increasing operational complexity, and mounting customer expectations for faster service, the “Digital Operations” program aimed to streamline operations through robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent document processing, and process mining. This ambitious transformation targeted 4,000+ processes across finance, customer operations, HR, supply chain, and network management.

Solutions Adopted

Telefónica implemented a comprehensive process automation ecosystem:

  • UiPath Enterprise Platform as the core RPA technology
  • Automation Anywhere for specific country operations
  • Celonis for process mining and discovery
  • ABBYY FlexiCapture for intelligent document processing
  • IBM Watson for cognitive automation capabilities
  • Microsoft Power Automate for citizen developer automation
  • Blue Prism for attended automation use cases
  • Appian for process orchestration and workflow
  • Camunda for complex business process management
  • Signavio for process modeling and optimisation
  • UiPath Process Gold for automation analytics
  • Custom-built automation control center
  • Centralised automation factory model with regional hubs

Implementation Costs

  • RPA platform licensing: €18.2 million
  • Additional automation technologies: €12.5 million
  • Infrastructure and environment setup: €8.7 million
  • Professional services and implementation: €24.6 million
  • Internal automation center of excellence: €14.3 million
  • Training and capability building: €7.8 million
  • Change management: €5.3 million
  • Process discovery and assessment: €9.4 million
  • Total investment: Approximately €100.8 million

Implementation Duration

  • Strategy development and planning: 4 months (February-May 2018)
  • Vendor selection and procurement: 3 months (June-August 2018)
  • Center of Excellence establishment: 5 months (September 2018-January 2019)
  • Implementation phases:
    • Finance processes automation: 10 months (November 2018-August 2019)
    • Customer operations automation: 12 months (February 2019-January 2020)
    • Supply chain automation: 8 months (July 2019-February 2020)
    • HR process automation: 7 months (December 2019-June 2020)
    • Network operations automation: 14 months (March 2020-April 2021)
    • IT service management automation: 9 months (January-September 2021)
  • Hyperautomation platform integration: 10 months (May 2021-February 2022)
  • Enterprise scaling and federated model: Ongoing (2022-present)
  • Total duration: 4 years (February 2018-February 2022)

Savings and Benefits

  • 5,200+ software robots deployed across global operations
  • €235 million annual run-rate savings achieved by 2023
  • 12.8 million hours of manual work eliminated annually
  • Average process handling time reduced by 68%
  • Customer query resolution time improved by 52%
  • Order-to-activation cycle reduced from 12 days to 4 days
  • Billing accuracy improved from 98.2% to 99.7%
  • Employee satisfaction increased by 32% in automated departments
  • Customer satisfaction scores improved by 18 points
  • 72% reduction in manual data entry errors
  • Network incident resolution time reduced by 45%
  • Supply chain efficiency improved by 28%
  • The financial close process reduced from 12 days to 5 days
  • Regulatory reporting time reduced by 65%
  • Four-year ROI of 460% with breakeven achieved at 16 months