Effecting an upgrade on a system serving 6,000 full-time users and 60,000 occasional users with minimum business disruption was critical. Accordingly, Accenture’s consulting and upgrade specialists and members of its 26,500-strong team of SAP professionals worked with business users and key stakeholders to confirm business operational requirements, and upstream/downstream application consequences. This close collaboration with the business put Accenture in a strong position to understand and avoid the potential risks of the upgrade.
Engaging the business, and taking the time to align the ERP upgrade strategy with the business strategy provided the project team with the insight to identify other complementary updates that could be made concurrently with the upgrade and that would contribute to Accenture’s readiness for its future development and growth. One of these was converting all data to Unicode, enabling the storage and support of data in any language and thus improving processing.
Prior to the upgrade, the team worked with key HR and finance resources to run several practice upgrades and conversions. Based on its experience delivering ERP projects and insight into the risks and challenges that organizations face during upgrades, Accenture has created—and continues to develop and refine—a complementary set of methodologies and resources, which offer organizations a reliable approach with flexible options to deliver successful upgrades rapidly and cost effectively.
For its own upgrade, Accenture was able to leverage this bank of tried and tested methodologies and tools, including its Upgrade Analysis Tools, estimating model and work plan to undertake all of the planning, execution and stabilization of the program.
The Accenture Global Delivery Center Network—particularly the Delivery Center in Bangalore, India—provided technical support after the upgrade. Post upgrade, end-user access to SAP was restored ahead of schedule. A stabilization team was on high alert to monitor processing, performance and usage of the updated applications, fine tune the overall system performance and improve run times for transactions. With no material business disruption, there were fewer than 15 issues and none took more than four hours to resolve.
The required user training was deployed shortly before the upgrade. Approximately 3,000 end-users and 12 support teams (more than 400 people across business and IT) had completed a 90-minute self-paced training course on application changes resulting from the upgrade.