STREAMLINING PROCUREMENT INTAKE AND ORCHESTRATION AT LUMEN

CLIENT

Lumen Technologies, an American telecommunications and technology company headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, operating one of North America’s largest fiber networks and serving enterprise, government, and wholesale customers.

PROJECT

Build the Rio intake solution, a single, streamlined way for Lumen’s internal business units to engage procurement across sourcing, supply chain, accounts payable, strategic sourcing, and Centre of Excellence processes.

RESULTS

PROJECT INFORMATION

Lumen recently restructured its procurement organization to better support its source-to-pay operations. As part of that shift, the company set out to create a single, consistent methodology for internal business units to engage the Procurement team and its processes.

Across the organization, requests touching procurement, supply chain, accounts payable, strategic sourcing, and the Centre of Excellence were handled through varied, ad-hoc paths. Lumen wanted one clear way in for every business unit, regardless of the type or category of spend.

The intake solution, delivered on the Rio platform, was scoped to simplify and standardize these processes.

The Challenge

Without a single intake methodology, business units engaged Procurement inconsistently, which made requests harder to route, track, and action across many distinct categories of spend. Lumen needed a unified front door that could capture the right information up front, apply the correct routing and approvals automatically, and scale across teams without adding manual overhead.

The Solution

ConvergentIS deployed the Rio intake solution as Lumen’s single point of entry for procurement requests. Each intake type is specific to Lumen’s processes and was delivered as a configurable workflow with guided, schema-driven forms, conditional logic, and built-in routing, so requesters answer only what is relevant to their request.

The solution standardizes intake across Lumen’s spend categories and channels requests into consistent, automated workflows that route work to the right teams and approvers. This reduces back-and-forth, improves the quality of information captured at the start, and gives Procurement a clearer view of incoming demand.

The Results

Since rollout, engagement with the procurement team has grown by 40%, reflecting strong adoption across business units. Requests that previously arrived through a patchwork of IMS tickets, emails, and meetings now flow through a single channel, giving Procurement full visibility into incoming volume and where it's coming from. The increase in requests reflects genuine adoption rather than added overhead: business units are choosing to route work through Rio because it gives them a clear, consistent way in. That volume has, in turn, increased the workload for the Procurement team, a direct sign that the solution is doing what it was built to do.

What's Next

Our next phase is expanding Rio’s automated intake-to-PR/PO capability across all spend categories, building on the automation already in place for maintenance requests. We’re developing Rio to interpret each request, collect the required data, apply the appropriate rules and approvals, and create the correct PR or PO directly in SAP.

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"Your team was able to take a 20-year-old legacy construction business procurement process and make it better than what it was. After I started working with you and your team... my mind was blown."

- Shellie Molina | Chief Procurement Officer

Why ConvergentIS?

Our team comes from a variety of different operational backgrounds, meaning we understand how people work. We recognize SAP S/4HANA as an out-of-the-box solution that has successfully solved business problems across several industries. But we realize some work processes are still challenging to learn with so many capabilities available in SAP.

Leveraging the SAP design methodology, we have co-innovated with organizations to build solutions that match the way they work. Since many teams face the same problems, we packaged them and made them available as an out-of-the-box application. This means your business still receives many of the benefits of a tailored application without the cost of a custom solution.