Accenture: Maximizing Financial Performance

The company needed to implement a comprehensive financial management solution that could help drive high performance and ensure compliance with changing accounting standards.

To manage its operations in 48 countries around the world, Accenture had a number of legacy finance applications, most of which were connected but not thoroughly integrated. It was becoming increasingly difficult to adapt this architecture to Accenture's evolving business needs. Accenture wanted to centrally manage its financial systems to improve accuracy in reporting, meet new business requirements and to leverage its considerable purchasing power as a global company.

Accenture drew upon its alliance partnerships as well as its internal pool of talent to implement SAP R/3 v4.6c with Microsoft enterprise technology. SAP offered an expandable, integrated solution with most of the features Accenture was seeking, and the Microsoft technology offered a lower total cost of ownership and greater compatibility with existing Microsoft applications. Accenture's experience in implementing more than 1,600 complex, global SAP solutions provided relevant expertise for its own implementation—one of the largest SAP implementations in the services sector. Accenture's finance team was closely involved in the project, which enhanced the system's performance and sped up the transition process once implementation was complete. Accenture's consulting and solutions teams worked closely with its CIO and finance organizations to ensure that a well-trained team was ready and the new enterprise solution met expectations.

With the SAP application in place, Accenture's finance organization can implement change centrally rather than having to go through hundreds of separate applications. The organization has greater insight into Accenture's accounting processes, offering new opportunities to identify savings and efficiencies. Finally, with its financial management system in place, Accenture is poised to integrate finance with other critical business functions, moving the global company toward high performance with its global approach to enterprise management.

This client success story is one of several featured in Accenture's SAP Global Capabilities brochure.