Telenor Shared Services

Our Pakistani colleagues had the pleasure of welcoming Jon Omund Revhaug, acting head of Telenor Nordics, along with TSS CEO Morten Dean Dunham and VP & and head of TSS’ Finance & Procurement tribe Siw Merethe Veseth, to Pakistan this week. During a local town hall, both Morten and Jon Omund addressed the employees. They both reflected on the #OneNordic strategy, also focusing on automation and GenAI and emphasizing how TSS is an integral part of the Nordic strategy. Jon Omund highlighted the importance of maintaining high standards and focus on providing quality services to the Nordic business units. Both Morten and Jon Omund conducted ‘open-door’ meetings, and Siw used the opportunity to meet with her Pakistani part of her tribe. Jon Omund expressed his satisfaction and happiness in meeting the competent, forward-thinking, vibrant, and skilled TSS Pakistan team. He also expressed his gratitude for the impact and contributions TSS is making towards achieving the One Nordic strategy. Text: Sara Ehtasham, photo: Aneel Anjum

Indeed a reason to celebrate! A joint one-stop-shop for all support across our business units in the Nordics! Congrats to everyone involved!!

Like many cloud adopting companies, TSS faced high cloud expenses. With multiple teams deploying resources across various cloud platforms without clear oversight, cost visibility was difficult, leading to budget overruns and inefficiencies. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, our cloud team stepped up to lead a FinOps initiative back in 2022. The first step was to initiate a comprehensive FinOps framework adoption activity which encompasses three crucial pillars: - Visibility, accountability, and optimization. Visibility: - We implemented robust monitoring and reporting tools, leveraging native tools and custom dashboards. This provided a real-time insight into the resource utilization. Accountability: - Through cross-functional collaboration with engineers, finance, business, and system owners, we established clear ownership and accountability for the cloud spend within each team. The outcome was actively engaged stakeholder that frequently optimized their resource usage and eliminating waste. Optimization: - armed with granular data and analytics, we identified low hanging fruits for optimization, such as cleaning unwanted resources, right-sizing instances, leveraging reserved resources and saving plans. Th change gave us tangible results; 1.       By optimizing the resource usage and eliminating inefficiencies, we achieved a significant reduction in cloud expenditures, surpassing the initial target by 30% cost savings. 2.       With improved visibility and accountability, teams became more proactive in managing their cloud resources, resulting in faster deployments and enhanced performance. 3.       The cost savings realized through FinOps were reinvested into innovation and growth initiatives. 4.       Our FinOps initiative sparked a cultural shift within the organization, instilling a mindset of continuous optimization and responsibility across all levels. “Our FinOps journey exemplifies the transformative power of FinOps in driving financial discipline, operational excellence and business agility in the cloud. By embracing a holistic approach to cloud cost management, the business units can unlock new opportunities for growth, innovation, and sustainable success in today’s digital economy,” says Lead Cloud Architect Merhawit G/Yohannes in Enterprise IT in TSS. Nordic collaboration In line with the One Nordic strategy, collaboration among the cloud architects has arisen. Gebreyohannes explains that when she started to investigate, Telenor Norway had already started to use the methodology, and that the business units now are sharing their experiences, developing common KPIs and roles involved to harmonize the FinOps methodology in the Nordics. In the photo, our cross functional DevOps team in TSS (f.l.) Najma Taj, Merhawit G/Yohannes, Tahzeena Tandel, and waqas latif.

Today marks yet another #OneNordic milestone as Telenor Shared Services (TSS) goes live with our new Nordic People Portal and HR Service Desk in Lisbon! 🚀   During the weekend, the common, Nordic 'People Portal' opened for traffic also from Telenor Sweden and DNA in Finland, making it our joint, one-stop-shop for all support within HR, IT, Finance and Procurement in all the Nordic business units. The concept is built on self-service and relevant information from all four business units are structured in a new, easy-to-use content structure. If users don't find the answer in People Portal, the Lisbon team is now ready to support! “During the last three weeks since our employees joined 27th May, the team has been through some thorough training in all the Nordic HR processes. They have done desk-top training before training on real cases from Nordic users. It would be bold to claim that they know all about Finnish vacation law or details within Swedish payroll, but they have learned the methodology and knows where to find the correct information - and who can support them in 2nd line,” VP and head of People Services Lene Gaathaug says. All Nordic HR The previous HR Service Desk in TSS handled Norwegian cases only. Denmark, Sweden and Finland have been added to the scope as part of the closer Nordic collaboration and One Nordic strategy, so some additional knowledge was required. “Our great trainers, Ali Tariq and HR team lead Silje Helene Stensrud has been on a round trip in the Nordics to collect all documented and undocumented processes from the HR teams in Telenor Sweden, Telenor Denmark and DNA. This knowledge is now transferred to the Lisbon team, and I’m confident they will handle this successfully,” squad lead for DevOps & Service Desk in TSS People Services, Vibeke Refsnes Johansen says. Best of luck, Service Desk team!  💪 (Photo, from left: 📸 Trainers Katariina Nordling (TSS/DNA) and Ali Tariq (TSS) together with the team: Silje, Daniela, Inês, Maria and Teresa. (Beatriz not present).

TSS embarking on Hyperautomation    The increasing complexity of business flows, coupled with the demand for efficiency, agility, and data-driven decision-making, necessitates the leveraging of advanced technologies like hyperautomation to optimize operations. TSS recently launched an intelligent reconciliation engine using hyperautoamtion methodology and fixing 160.000 financial deviations for the Nordic business units! Hyperautomation addresses the business needs by automating tasks across various systems and processes, improving accuracy, scalability, and agility, while also driving innovation and competitiveness in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. Hyperautomation is an advanced strategy that combines different automation technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), and others to automate complex business processes. Some concrete use cases that can benefit extensively from hyperautomation are Source to Pay invoice flows, Amex flows, cash management, and intercompany flows. First step made Recognizing the advantages and criticality of hyperautomation, the Automation & Integrations Squad in TSS Finance and Procurement Tribe embarked on this journey and can now announce the launch of a groundbreaking Intelligent Reconciliation engine. This innovative engine leverages hyperautomation methodologies, Ingesting data from multiple sources, making it readily available across the value chain to hyperautomate workflows. One of the cases where the engine is now implemented and being enhanced, is in the Source to Pay (S2P) invoice flow where it has been able to identify, analyze and fix approx. 160.000 (!) deviations across various systems. This will facilitate the Nordic business units in efficient processing with reduced latency and less capacity utilization. Head of Finance and Procurement Tribe, Siw Merethe Veseth stated: “Using cutting edge technology to improve processes both for the business units and for TSS is a high priority for us, to further strengthen the strategy of simplification, standardization and automation. Hyperautomation and the reconciliation engine are important steps in the right direction.” Amena Shakil, head of the Automation & Integration hub is looking forward to continue to innovate and deliver cutting-edge solutions to meet customer’s evolving needs and bringing more value chain cases like cash management and S2P Invoice flows to hyperautomation benefiting business users in terms of more efficient and accurate value chain flows!

TSS is hiring within Finance & Accounting in Islamabad, Pakistan!

New TSS Hub established in Lisbon! 🎂🎉 Monday May 27th marks a milestone for Telenor Shared Services as we officially kicked off our Portugal business support operation! 🫶 VP & Head of Architecture and Business Development, Tom Daffinrud has been responsible for establishing the new office, and Monday he could welcome the five first HR Service Desk employees and the new office manager together with VP & Head of People Services Lene Gaathaug, Vibeke Refsnes Johansen and Silje Helene Stensrud. They were later joined by Ali Tariq to kick off a three-week hectic training and knowledge transfer period. Go-live for the HR Service Desk is set to Monday 17th June. The new faces in TSS Lisbon, are service Desk operators Teresa Santos, Daniela Jankovic, Maria Shirley, Inês Lopes, Beatriz Fragoeiro and Office manager Edna Soares. 🙌👏 We are excited to have you join our team! Welcome!!