Procter & Gamble: Enterprise Information Management

Cincinnati, Ohio-based Procter & Gamble (P&G) has one of the world’s strongest portfolios of consumer products, serving consumers in 180 countries around the world.

When P&G needed help to revamp and rationalize the company’s growing network of community workspace portals, known as “decision cockpits," it sought out Accenture's expertise in enterprise information management.

Marta Foster, Vice President of Business Units and Market Development Organizations, P&G’s Global Business Services (GBS) and Patrick Kern, Director of Business Intelligence, P&G’s Global Business Services, talk about how decision cockpits make real-time business data available from across the company to decision makers, enabling smarter and faster decisions. Using advanced portal and business intelligence technologies, Accenture is helping revamp and rationalize the growing network of decision cockpits.

To strengthen P&G’s cockpit capabilities, GBS wanted a new cockpit development platform that would enable real-time business decision making and, more broadly, help P&G fulfill its purpose of improving the lives of consumers.

Under an ongoing, multiyear arrangement with P&G, Accenture deployed 50 resources from Accenture Information Management Services and the Accenture Global Delivery Network—located onsite in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in the Accenture Delivery Center in Hyderabad, India—to work closely with GBS professionals to design and deliver the new development platform.

By having Accenture assume responsibility for cockpit application development, application management and resource (developer) management functions, GBS has improved P&G’s enterprise information capabilities and, by extension, the company’s responsiveness and agility.

One of the biggest advantages of the decision cockpit solution has been its effect on reporting and, by extension, its effect on how P&G runs its business. “We have eliminated thousands and thousands of legacy reports," says Filippo Passerini, P&G’s president of global business services and CIO, "and we’re moving everything to visual cockpits where you can drill down with alerts, color coding, etc. This makes the business flow much more fluid, much more dynamic, much more in touch. Instead of reading what happened yesterday, last week or a month ago, we are trying to anticipate what is coming, staying in control and staying relevant. That is really what excited me, new upstream technologies, which, blended with the business processes, can transform the way we operate.”