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Case Study

Building the future of finance

EDF deployed SAP Central Finance to streamline financial processes, enable integrations, modernize capabilities and enhance closing process agility.

5-minute read

Call for change

As a global leader in low-carbon energy, EDF covers every sector of expertise in the Utilities industry.

EDF’s Corporate Functions and Corporate Finance departments needed to contribute to EDF's overall transformation and help improve efficiencies, reduce costs and provide better value to business entities. Meanwhile, EDF needed to overhaul its Corporate Finance IT platform, which had been built in the early 2000s.

EDF launched a core financial transformation program that would update its SAP® platform, implement a new finance system and provide users with key features and capabilities. EDF also took aim at streamlining overall processes between shared services, business entities and corporate finance.

When tech meets human ingenuity

EDF and Accenture collaborated to carry out a deep modernization of EDF’s core finance solution. This included the implementation of SAP S/4 Central Finance® and the adoption of SAP Business Process Consolidation®. Working together, EDF and Accenture:

Implemented a new SAP S/4HANA platform
To allow for better integration between shared services centers and corporate finance entities through a Central Finance system.

Decommissioned legacy systems
To help EDF address the obsolescence of older systems while meeting business needs from both a flexibility and coverage standpoint.

Provided full, real-time capabilities
To assist EDF employees from initial posting in source systems to statutory consolidation.

Implemented new management framework rules
To comply with new objectives and ensure an ad-hoc steering ability.

The project involved the migration of five SAP source systems and 1.5 billion documents for the initial load and is one of the biggest Central Finance implementations to date.

A valuable difference

This transformation has enabled the optimization of the close process, improved audit trails, and increased accountability, control, and analysis of financial data. Finance users have real-time capabilities from initial posting in source systems to statutory consolidation.

For EDF’s people, the real benefits lie in greater consistency, availability and sharing of data. Users have a single view through the new tool which lets them solve problems quickly and proactively. Employees can now decrease closing timelines and enhance accuracy, better manage closing simulations and even handle consolidations in real time.

EDF’s finance function is now more nimble in its ability to provide business value. This function can also better take into account business model evolutions. It can help manage potential M&A activity. And it can ensure best-in-class financial compliance as well as reliable and accurate publications that deliver timely financial communications to stakeholders.