As a leader in the highly competitive IT industry, CA is committed to business excellence, and it is constantly exploring ways to improve its performance. Consistent with this commitment, CA decided that it would transform its business processes to equip itself with the right tools to simplify and standardize critical processes and applications globally.
This decision was influenced by CA's realization that its 20-years-plus policy of creating and acquiring software solutions had led to highly heterogeneous systems within the company, making integration highly problematic. To create a system that was aligned with its business goals, that was scalable to accommodate expected growth and that would provide CA executives with reliable information on which to base business decisions, the systems needed to be standardized and consolidated.
Integrated systems would mean that infrastructure requirements could be reduced, with associated reductions in maintenance and management costs over time. This rationalization would also ensure that the business processes would be standardized across the global organization with executives gaining real-time access to consistent data.
Financial controls would also be simplified and made more effective. "We have ambitious growth plans, but realized our legacy systems had outlived their ability to help the company grow," said Savage. "We took a long-term, strategic view of what was needed to enable the growth and overall performance we wanted. The solution was a single, integrated enterprise resource planning solution around which we could simplify and standardize our business processes and create the kind of ready-for-action business organization we required."
For CA, SAP was a clear choice. SAP's software is built on industry-leading practices, which meant that it would provide the ideal template from which to build CA's own standard business processes. In addition, the two companies were already in a business relationship. Based on the scale of the project, CA decided on a solution with minimum customization. CA leveraged tested enterprise resource planning methods and integration techniques to deploy SAP. CA decided on Accenture as the systems integrator based on a number of factors, including Accenture's track record as a successful SAP implementer, our position as SAP's largest global alliance in the SAP alliance ecosystem as well as our ability to bring in resources to complement CA's in-house capabilities. The close alliance between SAP and Accenture ensured that Accenture could call on the highest levels of support from SAP's research and development teams. Accenture's strong methodological foundation also played a role in CA's decision: Accenture Delivery Methods for SAP is a proprietary framework to guide global multidisciplinary teams in meeting a client's business needs effectively—at reduced risk.
"Our High Performance Business research confirms what CA had realized. Mastery of IT business processes is a key to high performance and is also an indicator of a company's ability to innovate successfully," noted Accenture’s Stefan A. Kampe. "CA knew the role it wanted its enterprise resource planning system to play in creating a transformed, more effective organization, and we were proud to help them realize that vision."