Our cross-functional, enterprise asset management (EAM) program team needed to address an environment of disparate solutions and processes in order to migrate asset information to the ServiceNow Asset Management product. The goal was to have consistent global processes across Accenture and a capability to track assets from end to end with a single enterprise system.
Getting to this end state would require three phases of effort over a three-year period: establishing a foundational capability, deploying targeted geographies, and evolving the enterprise asset management (EAM) solution.
Establishing the foundation centered around rationalizing processes, data and establishing core integrations. Our project team migrated an initial 800,000 assets from disparate tools to the ServiceNow platform. This number is projected to reach 4 million. We rationalized data and implemented system controls to drive standardization and data integrity across asset information. Data governance controls and legal compliance guidelines were automated. Global ownership of data governance was established as well.
In addition, our team built integrations with ServiceNow and core platforms to drive automation with SAP Ariba for asset procurement and a single global SAP system instance for financial data. These connections help facilitate an integrated, end-to-end asset management life cycle by tracking assets from procurement until disposal, along with real-time audit and reconciliation capabilities.
During this time and in the subsequent phases, our team focused development on four key elements:
Global processes
Our team inventoried existing asset management processes across Accenture’s geographies and selected the best of them. We used these to reengineer new, end-to-end asset life cycle processes to get to a standard, global solution.
This solution can be customized at local levels to address specific regulatory compliance requirements. Designing this global process flow formed the "core" for deploying the asset management application in stages to Accenture’s 50 countries.
Custom portal
To provide an enhanced user experience, the team developed a custom, mobile-friendly service portal with an intuitive and interactive user interface. Key features include auto-generation of standardized asset tags and QR codes when assets are received. The asset manager capability lets asset teams view and edit assets, check the activity log as well as reprint asset tags. Asset teams can upload assets in bulk using an intuitive and easy-to-use template.
The portal is also accessible on mobile devices via a browser, making it easy for asset managers to tag assets and generate bar codes directly from their devices. For software managers, the portal enables end-user license management giving software owners the capability to allocate and manage the licenses they are responsible for. In addition, all Accenture people are able to view assets assigned to them and confirm receipt of assets shipped to them. This ability was especially important when thousands of laptops needed to be shipped to our people who needed to work remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dashboards
The team created several role-based dashboards that provide real-time reporting to govern data. The dashboard for asset managers provides the ability to precisely track all their assets, confirm data governance and accurately forecast stock refresh.
Those in asset operations can monitor and directly engage in asset life cycle activities (movement, maintenance and disposal) and related compliance tasks. The dashboards for Accenture Controllership give users end-to-end visibility on fixed-asset creation, accruals and overall reconciliation of physical assets in the EAM system and fixed assets in SAP. The dashboard for software asset administrators displays actionable information, trends and a cost-savings view.
The integration of the dashboards with Accenture’s SAP ERP system facilitates financial reconciliation of assets and eliminates the need for users to toggle between ServiceNow and SAP to download and compare records. Manual effort is greatly reduced, and users now have one unified view of asset records and consolidated reports.
Mobile app
Working jointly with ServiceNow, the team developed a powerful mobile app to register, manage and periodically audit assets from anywhere. The app has several distinct features, one of which is a multi-scan capability that enables asset teams to scan QR or bar codes on multiple assets in one pass. The mobile app is integrated with the overall solution and automates and accelerates the amount of time it takes to register assets, resulting in increased operational efficiencies and major time savings.
Collaboration counts
The EAM program teams consist of many members with specialized skills from different locations, working on different areas but toward one common goal. In our day-to-day efforts, our teams engaged more than 200 global stakeholders representing 50 countries. Team members and stakeholders participated in design thinking workshops to complete a gap assessment of the current processes and then developed "to-be" processes to finalize designs. Business analysts converted those processes into user stories that were then passed to the development team to write the code.
Other teams at Accenture’s Innovation Centers collaborated on the mobile app development together with ServiceNow. The collaboration of all our teams made tremendous progress in deploying the asset management solution to nearly all of Accenture’s geographic units globally. We continue to evolve and improve the solution.
