Our agile journey to transform procurement began with Accenture’s move to SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing and the deployment of the Guided Buying capability across Accenture to improve the buying experience. Our Procurement Plus and global IT organizations have continued to collaborate to enhance our capability. We are transforming content, digitizing procurement processes, building automations and intelligence on SAP Ariba, all on the journey to developing intelligent procurement.
Throughout this time, we’ve gained experience in addressing data and developing analytics solutions along with Accenture’s Applied Intelligence organization. Together, we have developed several advanced analytics solutions that help us address specific issues today.
Setting the foundation for advanced analytics
The advanced analytics solutions we have developed include:
Ariba procure-to-pay process improvement. We are using Celonis, a process mining and execution management solution, to identify and remove bottlenecks in the procure-to-pay process and improve the quality of execution. In so doing, we are optimizing standardization at scale. The data visualization capabilities of Celonis are helping us to develop deeper insights, allowing us to have fact-based conversations and highlighting similarities or differences of workflows, categories, or countries that are impacting global process turnaround time. We are leveraging the newer workbench and execution management capabilities to automate the execution of activities to confirm we can offer a higher level of operational service without increasing head count. This is a powerful enabler for change.
General ledger recommendations. We are using predictive analytics to identify and assign the financial data on requisitions and non-purchase order invoices. This capability better prepares buyers who are less familiar with accounting to be more accurate with their purchases, improving their user experience and significantly streamlining downstream accounts payable accuracy, time and cost.
Predictive contractor fulfillment. This tool uses predictive analytics that draw on historical information to help Accenture determine whether a contractor request can be filled. It also helps to assess the quality of the requirements and to view trends on cancellations by categories, clients and geographies. The tool allows our contractor onboarding teams to apply their time where it’s most valuable, delivering huge time savings in effort and higher satisfaction from suppliers in the quality of requests that they receive.
360-degree supplier relationships view. By integrating data about Accenture’s family of suppliers with Dun & Bradstreet services, this tool helps us understand the full scale of the relationship and partnership Accenture has with our suppliers, which is the key to gaining better insights as we partner with them.
Metrics at users’ fingertips. We have created and integrated targeted dashboards across the procure-to-pay and accounts payables areas to cascade to any user. The dashboards present performance against service level agreements (SLAs) and other business outcomes and key performance indicators (KPIs). They also derive data-driven, actionable insights and determine high-impact opportunities for process and key outcome improvements.