Infineon Technologies AG: IT Outsourcing

Accenture was able to speed up this process greatly by drawing on its knowledge transfer capabilities, change management skills and deep SAP experience. The collaboration is already delivering high-performance outcomes.

Client Background
Infineon Technologies AG is Europe's second-largest semiconductor manufacturer. A top 10 player globally, it has manufacturing sites in Europe, the United States and the Asia-Pacific region. It is also an intensely ambitious and visionary company: It has set itself the goal of becoming the global No. 4 in its sector.

As a player in the cyclical semiconductor industry, Infineon needed to find a way to cut support costs for the SAP solution suite while maintaining performance.

Infineon is a long-term customer of the SAP solution suite with instances of SAP in each of its 27 operating countries. Over the years this has grown into a highly diverse and decentralized installation, with many versions and modules of SAP in operation. Infineon has had to employ a large central IT team of permanent staff, complemented by external contractors to support the maintenance for these systems.

One area where Infineon saw the potential for both savings and performance improvements was in the maintenance of its worldwide suite of SAP systems. Infineon set Accenture a demanding challenge: to recommend a solution that would improve application support, reduce cost and free resources to invest in technology-enabled innovation taking Infineon to new levels of performance.

Together, Accenture and Infineon reasoned that if SAP maintenance could be redirected from the central IT team this would free these high-value staff members to work more closely with the business on innovations and improvements.

Keen to reap these benefits, Infineon set Accenture a tight timetable to come up with a working solution within two months. Accenture's approach was to use the resources of its Global Delivery Center Network, which meant that it would quickly create a robust support environment for Infineon without significant up-front investment.

Accenture and Infineon visited a number of locations across Accenture's global network picking the final locations that fit best with Infineon's own patterns of operation. The process and industry experts from Accenture worked closely with Infineon to ensure that once the handover was complete the delivery centers were able to work in seamless partnership with Infineon's users.

By teaming with Accenture, Infineon was able to move a highly complex and decentralized SAP implementation to a single, centrally controlled environment.

As a global company looking to outperform the competition, Infineon is continually exploring new ways to source its operations. Accenture's global network of delivery centers allows Infineon to access new locations, providing the same level of IT support as the rest of the organization. The relationship is already on target to achieve the projected savings for Infineon's baseline application maintenance costs, releasing over €43 million for reinvestment.

Karl Pomschar, senior vice president and chief information officer, Infineon Technologies, commented: "Infineon is currently reviewing and optimizing all in-house services. We have decided on Accenture as our outsourcing partner for our SAP environment." Accenture's contract with Infineon is in early stages but the arrangement is already delivering high-performance outcomes.