Process Harmonization across Remote Sites

Corporate Technology Development Center (CT DC) within Siemens is spread across 5 countries in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and multiple cities across India. The primary activities are centered on software development for products and solutions across all four Siemens sectors. With this global setup, the CT DC is able to offer to the Siemens Sectors services covering the full SW development life-cycle, both as "near-shoring" services - mainly from Central Eastern Europe - as well as "off-shoring" - typically from the big low cost locations in India. For CEE being relatively closer to the headquarters in Germany, the business processes and challenges there are quite different from that in India with its different structures and local environment. Further differences are regulatory requirements, languages, projects, expertise, culture, etc. Despite of these disparities, it was felt that it makes a lot of sense to identify areas where these two organizations could learn, use synergies and benefit from each other. This paper elaborates the approach taken in harmonizing the best of both worlds. The entire harmonization exercise was focused on 4 major categories - trainings, processes, tools and knowledge management. The paper describes each category in detail. In a nutshell, the paper describes our approach for process harmonization across remote sites as a “Best Practice” example for other corporations having a similar situation. Typical collaboration methods adopted in this project were regular telcos, supplemented by face to face meetings after every few months, sharing articles in our periodic internal magazines, etc. The first results and most important achievements obtained include the definition of a common set of Key Process Indicators (KPIs), a harmonized training concept, roll-out of a uniform customer management process and related tool, and a consistent career landscape with common roles and responsibilities across the entire CT DC.