Innovation Unleashed

It’s no secret that in order to keep up with competitors, innovation and constant company growth is the key to staying ahead. But how does Siemens GBS promote inspiration AND innovation? You host a virtual hackathon event asking employees to lay out all of their inefficient internal processes on the line and expose all of the errors that are occurring in their day-to-day activities.

Thus, bringing us to the first ever R2R Innovation Hackathon hosted by the US Record-to-Report (R2R) department in collaboration with our counterparts in R2R India. This event was aimed at connecting minds while inspiring to innovate but unlocked a whole new perspective on how Siemens GBS could improve their processes to better serve their employees and ultimately their customers.

Planning the Hackathon

Always seeking new opportunities to nurture creativity and collaboration, the concept of the hackathon emerged as a response to a growing and desirable need for innovation within our internal processes.

How can we efficiently organize an event and make sure that we are balancing the workload of our employees? You break up the event into three different parts and take the modern workplace culture into consideration.

A typical hackathon is usually hosted in person and comprises over a few days, for us to adapt our event with the work from home culture, we organized the event into three phases:

1. Brainstorming & Idea Generation: Employees begin to submit their ideas for inefficient solutions and form their teams that they would like to work with should their idea be chosen to move forward.

2. Planning & Presentations: The Planning portion comprises of participants getting together with their topic mentors and technical advisors as they begin to conceptualize their ideas. During Presentations, participants are able to blow away our judging panel with their insightful and transformational ideas.

3. Business Analysis & Implementation: After presentation and careful consideration of each proposed idea, our judges gather to decide which projects will be implemented and moving forward.

Kicking off the Event: Brainstorming & Idea Generation

Having kicked off in January of 2024, this is the start of the whole event as our employees submitted their proposed ideas and began to form their groups (with US & India colleagues), they would want to work with should their idea be approved. After careful evaluation, we narrowed down our 55 ideas into 27 groups.

Collaboration at its finest: Planning & Presentations

From here, the passing groups went on and were paired with topic mentors and technical advisors to assist them with the logistical planning behind their idea. Participants were also given various resources to assist them with their pitches that they would have to present for Presentation days.

Presentations took over the course of two days and after the planning phase narrowed down to 24 groups presenting total. Here, participants were able to blow away our judging panel with their insightful and transformational ideas. Our judges, comprising of senior executives, evaluated each project based on feasibility, ability to implement, scalability and alignment with the problem statement.

Hackathon Triumphs: Business Analysis & Implementation

After careful consideration of each proposed idea, our judging panel ultimately decided each idea was too good to pass. The more each idea was analyzed, our experts notice a connected solution and thus decided to move forward with all 24 pitches presented.

How will Siemens GBS implement and begin this proves to move forward? With agile methodology and planning, our teams will be broken down into different cycles for when they can begin their next steps for their project as some projects require a quicker timeline than others.

Impact:

The R2R Innovation Hackathon was a resounding success, proving that creativity and collaboration can flourish even in a remote setting. By harnessing and promoting inspiration internally, we have started a domino effect of innovation that not only improves our processes for our internal employees but ultimately effects and improves the end-to-end processes for our customers.

We look forward to keeping you updated as we start to see this trickle effect and make big changes for Siemens GBS R2R.