Accenture: SAP Enterprise Data Management

For forward-thinking organizations, resolving the challenge of master data management has become a strategic imperative in the drive to achieve high performance. When Accenture decided to implement a strong data governance framework, we created a master data management solution that spans the entire company.

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Organizations must find a way to manage unprecedented volumes of data in an integrated way across multiple teams and business functions, and put governance in place to ensure its integrity and quality. In addition, the recent emphasis on regulatory compliance has made creating and maintaining accurate and complete master data a business imperative.

According to Todd Harding, Accenture Finance and Operations executive, “Maintaining a single, globally consistent set of master data across the entire enterprise is critical to us being able to provide a fully integrated view of our operations and performance across 54 countries, 20 industries and 35 service lines. This allows us to support the smooth running of our $25 billion company, maintaining excellence in our service to clients and keeping our multiple workforces operating at peak efficiency.”

To ensure the availability, usability, quality, security and integrity of our master data, Accenture prioritizes a strong data governance framework.

With proper governance in place, Accenture implemented a single, integrated data model that spans horizontally across process areas and ensures that effects of changes in one area are recognized and addressed in related areas. “While the model assures rigorous processes, it also has the flexibility to adjust to the ever-changing reality of the business or to take on-board new applications or capabilities,” says Tom Krause, CIO enterprise data architect.

“When a new capability is moved onto our SAP instance, the master data and data modeling teams provide critical guidance on how to integrate the master data resident in the new capability into the existing model. They do this with minimal disruption to the smooth running of the business,” says Steve Collins, Accenture SAP Program delivery lead and executive data architect.

“The master data management solution that we have put in place helps us to run our business better, operate with greater responsiveness and speed, and lower our costs,” says Accenture Chief Information Officer Frank Modruson. “Equally important, it positions us to realize new opportunities and continue our drive towards high performance,” he adds.

Thanks to a shared vision and set of terminology upon which results are built across business units, functions and geographies, it is able to do cross-enterprise, cross-function reporting, combining, for example, finance, human resources and sales data globally to a level of detail needed to make business decisions.

“We can run our business confident in the knowledge that the quality of our data is assured and that decisions—wherever they are taken across the company—are based on a single, accurate source of the truth,” says Dan Kirner, executive director of Accenture’s Finance and Corporate Services applications.