Eni: Transformation of Financial Consolidation

Accenture helped Eni, an integrated energy company, improve its financial processes to comply with reporting deadlines and, even more importantly, position itself to achieve high performance.

Client Background
Eni is an integrated energy company active in the oil and gas, electricity generation and sales, petrochemical, oil field services, and construction and engineering industries. Based in Italy, the company operates in some 70 countries and has 76,000 employees. Its market capitalization was €91 billion on December 31, 2007.

High-performance businesses do not see compliance as an end in itself, but rather an opportunity to improve their processes, thus equipping themselves to outperform competitors. Eni needed to update its financial processes in order to meet reporting deadlines, and this required the company to improve its financial consolidation process. In turn, the integration between various parts of the company had to be strengthened so that data was accurate and in line with regulatory requirements. Consolidation also needed to be easier and less expensive.

With its wide experience in helping companies integrate their compliance initiatives into a broader strategy to achieve high performance, Accenture helped Eni to review the processes involved in consolidation and reporting, as well as the supporting technologies. Thereafter, Accenture helped conduct a feasibility study, select software and design the processes and solution architecture. Accenture also supported the rollout of the Oracle Financials solution, and managed a comprehensive change management process to ensure the new solution was accepted.

After working with Accenture, Eni now has a vastly improved financial consolidation process. The process of creating half-year and full-year financial statements has been dramatically shortened. Perhaps more important than the compliance is the benefit derived from the strengthened process, which has reduced the need for data transfer and validation activities and thus freed some 1,200 users to focus on value-added activities such as data analysis. As confirmed by Accenture High Performance Business research, these wider benefits demonstrate why high-performance businesses are typically masters of the finance process.