Deutsche Telekom modernizes SAP while maintaining a clean core

The Business Issue

Deutsche Telekom relies on SAP for essential work, including payroll, finance, time management, and employee master data. It gives the company a consistent record across business units and countries, including the financial figures it reports to capital markets.

But keeping SAP standardized became harder as business needs changed. Over time, Deutsche Telekom developed more than 650 custom solutions in SAP. Those additions helped meet specialized needs, but they also created a growing problem as the company prepared for a cloud-ready future, where every customization could increase upgrade effort, testing requirements, and long-term maintenance costs.

The challenge extended well beyond technology. Hundreds of business processes spanned multiple countries, business units, and systems. The company needed a way to simplify operations, improve the employee experience, and accelerate change while preserving SAP's role as the trusted system of record. The question was not whether SAP should remain at the center of the enterprise. The question was how to deliver the agility the business demanded without compromising the stability, governance, and upgradeability of the core.

The Solution

Deutsche Telekom adopted a clean-core strategy built around a simple principle: Keep SAP as close to its standard configuration as possible while building individualized workflows alongside it.

The company continues to use SAP where a proven standard transaction meets the need. Payroll, timekeeping, bookkeeping, and related financial processes remain in the system designed to manage them.

For complex workflows that span several transactions or systems, Deutsche Telekom uses Pega to manage the sequence of work. Pega gathers information from the relevant systems, guides the user through the process, calls the required transactions, and returns the result to the appropriate system of record.

This distinction matters because many business processes involve more than one SAP transaction. An HR request involving leave for a sick child, for example, can require separate checks for eligibility, conflicting time entries, available leave, and possible payroll effects. Pega manages that sequence, while SAP performs the underlying calculations and stores the final record.

This approach allows Deutsche Telekom to modernize business operations without introducing additional technical debt into SAP. By separating process orchestration from transactional processing, the organization can innovate faster while preserving the integrity of its SAP environment. The result is a practical modernization model that combines the stability of SAP with the agility of Pega, enabling Deutsche Telekom to continue evolving its business processes while maintaining a clean-core architecture.

The Results

Using this strategy, Deutsche Telekom streamlined and modernized more than 800 business processes, consolidating them into approximately 300 reusable workflows that support more than 150,000 active users across Europe.

The transformation improved both operational efficiency and user experience. Increased automation enabled higher levels of zero-touch processing, reducing manual effort across service interactions. Greater transparency into workflow status and process execution significantly reduced redundant requests, allowing service teams to spend more time delivering value and less time responding to duplicate inquiries.

The organization also accelerated the pace of delivery. By building reusable workflow assets and separating process logic from the ERP core, Deutsche Telekom reported the ability to implement new workflows substantially faster than with traditional ERP-centric approaches.

Perhaps most importantly, Deutsche Telekom demonstrated that organizations do not need to choose between SAP standardization and business agility. By preserving SAP as the trusted system of record while using Pega to orchestrate differentiated workflows, the company established a scalable modernization model that supports innovation, cloud readiness, and long-term maintainability.

Want to dive deeper into their journey? Watch their PegaWorld session.