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With a myriad of legacy systems gained from acquisitions hindering economies of scale, this brokerage turned to Accenture to consolidate numerous systems onto an integrated platform.
This company is a leading global provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage and human capital consulting.
The brokerage had grown through acquisitions, and was having difficulty extracting economies of scale from its collective IT infrastructure. The company decided to team with Accenture to integrate and consolidate applications across the organization as part of a six-and-a-half year application outsourcing agreement.
The company realized an application management cost reduction of more than 36 percent from day one, helping the organization meet its ambitious IT cost-cutting targets.
This global insurance brokerage had grown through acquisitions over the company’s first 20 years, but did little to push systems or process integration and so was having difficulty extracting economies of scale from its collective IT infrastructure. When synergies failed to materialize after a series of large acquisitions, the firm’s share price began to drop.
To reverse the slide, a new CEO decided that the company needed to reduce its IT budget by 40-50 percent—without sacrificing its competitive position or its efforts to achieve high performance. The company decided to team with Accenture to integrate and consolidate applications across the organization as part of a six-and-a-half year application outsourcing agreement.
Accenture acted as the main application maintenance and development outsourcing provider to all four of the insurance group’s constituent companies. Although back-office finance and HR applications had been previously integrated by Accenture, the remaining ones (mostly non-Enterprise Resource Planning) were unique to each business.
Accenture consolidated and integrated the company’s geographic business applications under one umbrella and transitioned 300 IT employees to Accenture. Two-thirds of the project team was staffed by people from Avanade, a joint venture company between Accenture and Microsoft, bringing specialist skills in Visual Basic and .Net to the team. Accenture’s Global Delivery Network provided many of the Avanade resources needed to help Accenture manage and implement solutions on the Microsoft platform. Avanade’s Microsoft assets and expertise—coupled with Accenture’s industry, process, change and outsourcing capabilities—delivered a complete end-to-end business solution.
Eighty percent of the company’s application support roles were moved offshore to Accenture’s Global Delivery Centers in Bangalore and Chennai, India, providing round-the-clock help desk support to business application users. This four-month transition project involved 300 people, 350 systems and over 200 different technologies.
Accenture helped the client realize an application management cost reduction of more than 36 percent from day one, helping the company meet its ambitious IT cost-cutting targets.
Accenture’s work has also provided:
More predictable application costs and delivery
Common processes and tools, making application management more efficient and effective
Successful migration to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) level 3 certification
Greater flexibility to dedicate valuable IT resources to additional business requests
The company has leveraged Accenture’s IT mastery to achieve integration, simplification and standardization of its once disparate IT systems, helping to put the company firmly on the road to high performance.
May 2012