After getting to know each other as a whole group at the Georgia Tech Lab on Monday, we drove to Carrollton in the evening after the Atlanta Braves baseball game to continue working on our case the next day. As Team 1, we focused on Southwire’s procure-to-pay processes and initially had to dive into the data and processes in Celonis to understand them. This was not always easy, so we often had to reach out to contacts like Rob Thompson from Celonis or Kayla Ledbetter from Southwire to clarify any open questions. In the mornings, we also had team calls with individuals from Southwire’s procure-to-pay department, which allowed us to more or less complete the “Empathize” stage of the Design Thinking approach. After that, we attempted to define the main pain points of Southwire’s procure-to-pay processes. Since Team 3 was also working on the procure-to-pay processes, we agreed that the two groups would focus on different aspects within this area to find as diverse solution approaches as possible. We primarily focused on contracts and communication within and outside of Southwire, essentially operating at the beginning of the process. Consequently, Group 3 dealt with the “backend” of the procure-to-pay process. Compared to other days, this day was rather frustrating as we struggled to understand the processes in Celonis and the program in general. This was partly due to the fact that as students from Münster, we did not have access to the data in Celonis, so we couldn’t prepare in advance. We completed the Defining stage of the Design Thinking approach with the identified pain points so that we could dive into the Ideate stage directly on Wednesday.
