Aside from two years as the IT director of a packaging company in his native Spain, Eliseo Belmonte has been with Accenture since his graduation in 1990.
An electrical engineer by training, Belmonte is an SAP specialist with a very clear vision of the contribution this software suite can make to an organization’s drive to achieve high performance.
It is this vision that Belmonte wants to inspire Accenture’s SAP business, which he has headed since March 2009. “SAP is a great platform for innovation, and Accenture globally has the right talent, deep SAP capability and industry knowledge to be able to help local organizations leverage their SAP investment innovatively to achieve high performance.
"Accenture High Performance Business research has shown that leading companies gain competitive edge by their ability to use their enterprise resource planning systems innovatively—and that’s exactly what we must help them to do.”
While many South African organizations are still in the throes of implementing and stabilizing on SAP for the first time, leaders are already moving into the “second phase,” which involves leveraging the basic system with niche applications and modules to really drive value.
“We have a stable and established client base here in South Africa, and many of them are now ripe to begin really realizing exponential value from the investments they have made in SAP,” Belmonte says. This aim will be furthered by Belmonte’s determination to link the South African SAP group more closely to the innovation generated by the global service line.
One of the challenges facing Belmonte is how to meet growing demand from existing and potential clients. “The solution is to back up the valuable local people—those with the strong client relationships and the intimate knowledge of the local business environment—with an army of delivery specialists. Some of these are onshore, but they would be backed up by our extensive delivery capabilities offshore as well. This is a variation on the manufacturing model, where the innovation and new product development is done in the home country, but the actual product manufacture is done in elsewhere,” he explains. “Such a model will give our local delivery teams great scalability, and will give us the space to grow our existing local specialists—and develop more of them.”
Belmonte’s commitment to the South African business is mirrored by that of his family—his wife and two sons have also made the great trek south. They are keen mountain bikers but, with no mountains nearby, are looking forward to unwinding while they explore South Africa’s world-famous national parks. “Golf is much more accessible here than it is in Spain—I also have the goal of playing much more and improving my game a lot,” he confides.
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