ABSA: Enterprise Resource Planning Solution

Accenture successfully helped Absa, the Barclays-owned South African banking giant, create a unified information management platform based on SAP. The new solution supports Absa's drive to achieve high performance-and become the pre-eminent African bank.

Absa was formed by the merging of four major financial services institutions in 1991. These mergers created a complex business model with fragmented information management environments, high maintenance costs, duplication of effort as well as inconsistent financial, risk and management.

Absa selected SAP as the preferred product supplier to simplify its current landscape and create a single source of information for financial and risk management and statutory regulatory reporting.

Various business functions were the direct recipients of improvements to their operations, including Absa’s Real Estate & Asset Management (REAM), Group Finance, HR and Procurement.

Client Background

The Absa Group Limited (Absa), listed on the JSE Limited, is one of South Africa's largest financial services groups formed in 1991 by the merger of four major financial services organizations.

Absa's business is conducted primarily in South Africa and on the Africa continent, where it has equity holdings in banks in Mozambique, Angola, Tanzania, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

At 30 June 2006, Absa had assets of R466,6 billion, more than 720 physical outlets, 8,1 million customers, 6 256 automated teller machines and 34 688 permanent employees.

Absa became a subsidiary of Barclays Bank PLC in July 2005, when Barclays acquired a controlling stake in the Absa Group. Barclays is an international financial services group engaged in retail and commercial banking, credit card issuing, investment banking, wealth management and investment management services.

Accenture has been involved in the overall program since the initial business case was prepared in 2003.

Early on in the conception of the program, Accenture shared delivery responsibility for design phases with other consortium partners SAP and IBM. In 2005, Accenture took delivery responsibility for the full solution, and the restructured program placed all separate capabilities under one project. With its deep experience in banking Accenture was able to leverage a blend of capabilities, especially in relation to the overall project management and the implementation-specific disciplines such as data conversion and complex cut-over management.

An early challenge in the project’s delivery lifecycle was the partnering process needed to achieve a collective commitment to a common delivery goal and timeline. Accenture’s estimating and contracting skills helped enable combined planning, thereby ensuring upfront buy-in from all parties.

To help a large and complex institution like Absa achieve high performance through SAP entailed a complex project with a wide scope and demanding integration issues.

Nine integrated SAP modules were deployed requiring very tight management of scope and business requirements. Over 20 interfaces required specifications, delivering and testing to ensure integration; and over 3,000 end users had to be trained and authorized on SAP. Furthermore, nearly two million data records had to be converted from 11 source legacy systems, and 14 applications were decommissioned. The broad and complex scope of the project demanded extreme focus from the Accenture team charged with the overall delivery responsibility.

The project went live on July 17, 2006, and its results were hailed by Absa chief operating officer and program sponsor Pieter van der Merwe as proof that the bank could “…respond to the need for enhanced, world-class operational capabilities as a result of ever increasing cycles of business change towards becoming the pre-eminent bank on the African continent.”

“Our successful completion of this project confirms Accenture’s ability to help our clients—of whom Absa is one of most valued and strategic—achieve high performance,” said Dave Eadie, senior executive—Accenture.