BT Group: Finance and Accounting Outsourcing

BT has taken finance outsourcing in a new and more strategic direction. As a result, it now enjoys outstanding finance performance levels, as well as worldwide visibility into the activities, accomplishments and concerns of its financial operations.

Client Background
Serving 18 million business and residential customers in 170 countries, BT Group is one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions and services. The organization’s principal activities include networked IT services; local, national and international telecommunications services; and broadband and Internet products and services.

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A key tenet of high performance is constantly seeking ways to “raise the bar.” True to this principle, BT Group launched an aggressive finance operations improvement program in 2006, which included outsourcing financial transaction processing. Internal cost reductions (up to 50 percent) were a key driver. However, BT was even more focused on the bigger prize: operational excellence, superior service to customers, standardized processes, tighter metrics, higher levels of visibility and improved controls and compliance.

Several years previous, BT and Accenture’s Finance and Performance Management consulting group had worked together to design a new finance operating model. Implemented by BT, the model supports worldwide centralization of the company’s finance and accounting activities, and the consolidation of disparate teams into Centers of Excellence based on core functional activities. This initiative also highlighted how outsourcing could improve service levels and reduce costs within finance.

The first of two outsourcing initiatives began in 2006, with Accenture working with BT to outsource its non-UK finance activities. Professionals in the Accenture Delivery Centers in Prague, Czech Republic, and Chennai, India, assumed the management of multiple finance processes.

The second program—a genuine sea change in finance and accounting outsourcing—was launched in early 2007, when BT transferred 50 percent of its reporting, planning and analysis functions. As a result Accenture is helping to:

• Deliver higher-value finance and accounting services—including management reporting, financial planning/analysis, month-end close activities and budgeting/forecasting services—from the Accenture Delivery Center in Chennai, India.
  
  
• Assist in design and implementation of a robust control and compliance framework to support Sarbanes-Oxley obligations and meet BT’s internal performance benchmarks and metrics.
  
  
• Automate less strategic reporting and analysis activity, enabling the broader finance team to more proactively support market/industry evaluation, customer segmentation analyses and competitor assessments.

BT is using outsourcing in a unique way and is deriving benefits that few other initiatives have realized. From the first initiative, BT’s costs per transaction have dropped by almost 60 percent and total cost of ownership fell by half. But the rewards of finance transformation go beyond the quantifiable. BT has taken finance outsourcing in a new and more strategic direction. As a result, it now enjoys outstanding finance performance levels, as well as worldwide visibility into the activities, accomplishments and concerns of its financial operations.

Greater flexibility is another benefit—BT’s strategic personnel have more time to do their jobs. And BT’s ambitious plans to grow can be accommodated more effectively without major disruptions to the business.

BT Finance is exhibiting more characteristics of high performance than ever before. BT Group’s success—lower costs, increased visibility, stronger metrics, greater flexibility and all the tools needed to achieve continuous improvement—are strong evidence.

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