Client
BP—North America Finance and Accounting Outsourcing
On the Web
www.bp.com Project
Outsourcing
Shorcut to
Business Challenge
How Accenture Helped
High
Performance Delivered Executive Summary
Accenture is helping BP to rapidly turn its blockbuster
acquisitions of Amoco and ARCO into growth assets, in both downstream and
upstream operations. Accenture professionals, working from the multi-client
Delivery Centre in Houston and from BP's upstream operations in Alaska, are
providing finance and accounting services that have helped to speed post-merger
integration and capture new value.
Winning Strategies: Outsourcing at BP in North
America Fueling Bold Growth
Already
one of the world's foremost energy enterprises, BP made a bold move to expand
its brand across the North American continent through the integration of two
companies nearly as huge as itself: Amoco in 2000 and ARCO one year later.
Overnight, BP's critical challenge became speed. To capture the value from the
new units rapidly without getting swamped with costly post-merger integration
demanded smooth support. Where did BP turn to integrate its assets? To a
company with the skills to turn vast growth into smart growth fast: Accenture.
In 1996, some 85 BP professionals joined Accenture's energy
team as it began providing financial services for BP downstream operations in
the United States. Accenture's outsourcing business takes key non-core processes such as finance and accounting and turns these cost centers into
high-value service centers by arming freshly motivated people with the
necessary practices and proprietary methodologies. The client gains the focused
freedom to engineer strategic leaps, secure in the knowledge that every step is
backed up by solid processes.
From these origins, Accenture's team has now multiplied six times over to number nearly 500 professionals working at Accenture Delivery Centres in Houston at Granite Park and in Alaska. The way this growth occurred
reflects both BP's astonishing pace and Accenture's readiness to swiftly evolve
and innovate to make BP's vision happen.
Business
Challenge BP's Manifest Destiny: Amoco and ARCO
When BP merged with Amoco to capitalize on its market
strength in the mid-western United States, downstream services for Amoco
transferred from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Houston. With barely a pause, BP then
proceeded to acquire ARCO's U.S. West Coast operations, adding still another
layer of complexity to the outsourcing arrangement as an additional 105 people
from Los Angeles were absorbed into the Accenture Delivery Centre in Houston at
Granite Park.
How Accenture Helped While BP was in its acquisition mode, Accenture’s principal
brief was to achieve “silent running”—to be able to take on new workloads, and
handle multiple systems and services, without disruptions or loss of service
quality. Accenture has been able to do this and more over the course of its
relationship with BP in the United States. By quickly and consistently pulling
together the right resources, Accenture has been able to take on a dramatically
more complex workload while still providing cost savings of approximately 22.5
percent on the original scope of the engagement.
"Certainly the Accenture Delivery Centre has helped us
manage our costs by increasing the economies of scale," says BP commercial
manager Russ Taruscio. "I think Accenture has very focused outsourcing
relationships. They understand what BP objectives are, and they do a very good
job of aligning their objectives with BP. I don’t think it would have been
possible to manage costs as we have and to grow simultaneously without the
assistance of an outsourcing provider." Given this level of client
satisfaction, it is hardly surprising that Outsourcing
Journal's 2002 Editor's Choice Awards, which recognize the most
outstanding outsourcing relationships in the world, singled out the
BP-Accenture collaboration as its top choice for "Best of the Best."
Transforming Technology For Downstream
Operations
When Accenture's outsourcing services to BP
began in 1996, the assumption was that there would be a single information technology platform on which to work. This turned out not to be the case: BP's legacy system was an Oracle platform, while Amoco's system used SAP, and ARCO
utilized yet another. According to Russ Taruscio, "The main technology
challenge was having three companies on three platforms. The consolidation
process was made more difficult by having to bring data from three different
systems together, yet overcome the cost challenges, while not having completed
implementation of an efficient single system process."
The migration of BP, Amoco and ARCO financial and
information systems to a common platform, for which SAP was chosen, is
scheduled for completion in 2002. The fact that Accenture professionals can
provide solid SAP skills is bound to help speed the implementation ahead. Both
BP and Accenture see real value in combining finance and information technology services under a single provider, giving Accenture the long-term responsibility for people, process and technology, capabilities for which it is known.
Once a common platform is available, it will be even more
advantageous to exploit innovations in areas such as eCommerce. In fact
Accenture has entered into a relationship with BP’s procurement team to put
more BP vendors into an electronic exchange of invoicing and payments, and
recently completed an "e-downstream" transaction clearinghouse for movement of
all refinery products. This development alone has the potential to drive 30
percent of the cost out of what is a very complex process.
High Performance Delivered Accenture: Fuelling Growth And
Innovation
Accenture's Delivery Centre in Houston at
Granite Park is now a shared-service, multi-client center. As a result,
knowledgeable employees at the center are working closely with industry leaders
like Lyondell Citgo as well as up-and-coming players such as Penreco, a leading
producer of chemical specialties, and Alliance Gridco, which plans to manage regional electric transmission over a major portion of the United States. The
sharing of insights and ideas is clearly working to the benefit of one and all.
Meanwhile, Accenture continues to support BP's refinery and retail operations, franchise and credit card services, plus all the other
finance and accounting processes required to keep the US business humming. With
a common technology platform in place, Accenture is helping to set the stage
for vastly improved and enriched customer experiences such as BP Connect, a
revolutionary retail concept that will bring a bigger BP brand to life in the
eyes of the customer. More than a "gas station," BP Connect stations will be
solar-powered, and feature novel pump design with built-in order screens.
"Our goal is to give our customers what they want: more
convenience, more choice, and more help in their busy lives,” says Doug Ford,
until recently chief executive for BP’s Refining and Marketing. In a truly
creative collaboration, Accenture is helping BP to achieve its goal of customer
focus with the BP Connect offering, including development of its retail
capability, site architecture, global merchandising systems program, and the
mission-critical SAP platform needed to support it. As hundreds of BP retail
sites across the United States and thousands worldwide move to the BP Connect
concept, BP remains pleased at the prospect of welcoming walk-in shops with
Internet cafes and online shopping, fresh coffee and food, plus free Web-based
information for visitors.
“BP is in the process of rolling out a new convenience
store offer, and it is a much bigger and broader, more sophisticated offer than
we’ve had in the past," says Alan Eilles, BP's downstream chief financial
officer. "To manage those activities successfully, we needed a very different
set of systems and management information capability. Accenture was able to bring to the table a much more sophisticated capability than we were able to
develop internally."
Driving Upstream Operations: The Accenture
Delivery Centre in Alaska
As large as the downstream
workload was, BP's upstream operations in Alaska posed different but equally
daunting challenges. Accenture had been supporting BP there since 1996, but the
integration of Amoco and ARCO took the relationship to a new level.
The operation of the giant Prudhoe Bay oilfield, previously
performed by both BP and ARCO, was transferred to BP. Accenture faced the task
of integrating the former ARCO finance and accounting operations with the
existing service. Fortunately Accenture had a pool of seasoned personnel to
draw on, people with solid financial experience and the resulting strong skills
to move things forward fast. The result: 64 people handling upstream operations
in Alaska, supported by 26 more in Houston, providing full-service upstream
finance and accounting services, including joint-interest accounting and
billing, financial planning and analysis, and global budget and forecasting.
"We rely on Accenture to provide us with excellent finance
and accounting services, so that we can focus on finding and producing oil,"
says Rob Johnston, finance manager of BP Exploration (Alaska), Inc. "We believe
Accenture provides a very good service; they are clearly committed to making
this relationship a success. In both the upstream and the downstream business,
they have greatly helped us in managing change."
Learn how Accenture can deliver these capabilities through our Global Delivery Center Network. To Top |