Digitization of procurement operations
Manual procurement-related legal and regulatory review steps were built into the buying workflow and brought online. This shift from offline to online digitized Accenture’s entire scope of procurement operations, reducing manual workload and providing end-to-end transaction transparency and audit traceability that helped drive improvement in the processing turnaround time.

Accenture is using the process mining solution from SAP ecosystem partner Celonis to leverage this transparency and traceability to develop deeper insights, such as: Are similar workflows running in processes across the different spend areas, across the different categories in different regions and how or where can they be influenced? This solution helps Accenture to continuously improve the customer experience and effectiveness of internal teams by reducing friction and improving turnaround time.

Yet another digitization advancement is a Procurement Operations Desk that runs in 23 countries with individuals who perform approval activities for requisitions effectively. These individuals allocate manual work to Procurement agents, speed the processing of purchase requests, differentiate the requirements, and where needed, assign purchase requests to specialized agents. They are well equipped to consolidate information from purchase requests onto a single dashboard. These activities have resulted in increasing the quality of service, shortening turnaround time, and reducing risk.

Move to intelligent procurement
A key goal is to create a more intelligent platform that is attuned to end-user needs by leveraging predictive analytics, automation and AI. One example is Accenture’s use of AI and predictive analytics to identify and assign the general ledger to requisitions and non-purchase order invoices. Another is the development of a virtual assistant that surfaces on different pages during the buying process to give automated responses or connect the user with a live agent. It will eventually simplify updates to forms.

Development of intelligent spend management
Accenture strives to be a data-driven enterprise, and as such, the Procurement Plus organization is developing analytics on spend—on what, why, and where are suppliers meeting objectives and what alternatives exist. The vision is to expand the management of spend with intelligence to other areas of the business, such as time & expense and travel expense, using analytics across areas. Accenture’s single global SAP S/4HANA® instance enables data to be readily available and accessible to provide these insights. Procurement Plus is in the process of combining and enriching data from multiple systems in Accenture’s data lake so that it can obtain more profound insights.

The need for better spend visibility has driven Accenture to move to SAP Fieldglass® as the solution that will help Accenture to manage its statement of work for services-based spend. This can aid Accenture to actively manage services contracts, improve audit focus, and achieve more accuracy in aligning to contracted terms.