Telstra shifts staff between supply chains during retail peaks and natural disasters

Telstra has uplifted its supply chain planning in parallel with a multi-year enterprise resource planning transformation, allowing the telco to dynamically move staff between supply chains during peak sales periods or natural disasters.

Telstra's Jenni Decker (third from left), speaking at SAP NOW A/NZ.

Principal (general manager) of supply chain planning, retail and industrial, Jenni Decker told the recent SAP NOW A/NZ summit that Telstra has deployed SAP integrated business planning (IBP) as a standard technology layer for all supply chain planning.

This is supported by enterprise resource planning (ERP) consolidation and some AI and machine learning “augmentations” in its device supply chain only.

The telco has three distinct supply chains, Decker said.

“The three supply chains include a spare parts supply chain [for] the provision of spare parts to rectify network faults; a build supply chain, which is the provision of materials to build and maintain Telstra’s network which includes supporting the 5G rollout, and thirdly … a devices supply chain so the provision of mobile phones, modems, accessories, etc to wholesale, retail and enterprise customers,” she said.

Supply chain operates as an internal shared services function within Telstra, though this structure is a relatively recent one.

“Five-to-six years ago, we went through an insourcing project after being outsourced to two different partners for more than 10 years,” Decker said.

“As a product of that outsourcing activity, there was significant divergence across processes and process capability, people capability as well as the technology that was actually deployed.”

Decker said that “the manifestation of each supply chain having its technology has basically meant that each of those supply chains was working in silos, each milking the technology that they had in place, but often reinventing the wheel over and over again trying to solve the same supply chain problems.”

The ERP consolidation and upgrade of supply chain planning technology has been underway for several years, and the planning upgrades are still being worked through.

It started to go live earlier this year, according to a slide deck [pdf] published as part of an SAP-run awards programme. 

Decker highlighted workforce mobility as a key outcome of the consolidated supply chain planning works.

“We now have driven not only capability within each of the supply chains, but we now have the ability to drive cross-supply chain capability because we’re all using the same stuff, so that means I can use the collective brain power and experience of my 43-odd onshore resources to solve problems across the supply chain,” Decker said.

“I also am able to ‘lever’ their capacity, so I can now move people - and have moved people - within days from one supply chain to another, which was previously completely inconceivable, it would have taken me months to do that. 

“So that means I can move people around, either in peak selling periods, so in retail it’s the Black Friday [to] Christmas period of time, or through peak natural disaster periods in the spares supply chain, and I also have now the tremendous ability to be able to ‘lever’ my capability and capacity to support Telstra’s growth trajectory.”

Decker said that the workforce mobility was not only good for Telstra, but also good for staff as well.

“It’s provided them with tremendous career opportunities, because they now can move from supply chain to supply chain and get that extension of capability and industry experience as well,” she said.

ERP consolidation

Decker briefly referenced also a major program of work running in parallel to consolidate Telstra onto a single SAP S/4HANA-based ERP system, which the telco internally calls ‘SAPphire’.

The awards slide deck reveals that the telco, alongside Accenture, “successfully collapsed three separate legacy ERP systems (Oracle, SAP ECC) into one integrated corporate ERP based on S/4HANA private cloud edition” on Azure.

The overarching aim of the consolidation was to power a “significant shift towards a new operating model focused on simplifying and standardising operations across all facets of the organisation.” 

“This program specifically aimed to establish a standard set of global processes and practices in finance, procurement, and supply chain management,” the deck states.

“The rollout began with [Telstra’s] international business in April 2022, involving around 200 finance users, followed by a larger deployment to [its] domestic business in July 2023, with approximately 2500 users across finance, procurement, and supply chain” across 14 countries.

Telstra indicated the SAPphire program “is on track to deliver [greater than] $50 million solely on IT platform benefits by FY26 and $9 million recurring benefit year-on-year.”

An architecture slide for the supply chain operations shows that the ERP underpinnings of the various supply chains still varies, however, with SAP ECC, S/4HANA and other systems still in use.