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CLIENT CASE STUDY

BT Spain: Oracle eBusiness finance transformation

A major communications provider, BT serves customers in the United Kingdom and more than 170 other countries around the globe. With more than 20,000 employees, the company provides fixed-line services, broadband, mobile and television products and services, as well as networked IT services.

Overview

Accenture helped BT Spain upgrade its financial systems to Oracle R12.1.3, replacing the company’s obsolete and overly customized R11.0.3 platform.

Since the upgrade, BT Spain has been able to complete processes in less time and obtain information much more quickly, decreasing the time to perform tasks. The company has also reduced application and infrastructure support costs and lowered the risk of inconsistent data.

Opportunity
BT Spain’s financial systems were running on an outdated, unsupported platform—Oracle R11.0.3. With more than 300 complex customizations, the client found it difficult to implement new business-critical functionalities that were important to ensuring statutory compliance. It wanted to upgrade and streamline its old financial management systems to simplify and reduce the level of customization, include new functionalities, and transition to the latest Oracle enterprise platform.

Solution

BT selected Accenture for its Oracle upgrade project based on our extensive global knowledge and experience in implementing Oracle E-Business Suite. Accenture helped the client transition its financial systems to the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3.

The team began by identifying potential areas where business process changes and enhanced functionalities of the Oracle R12 platform could reduce application customizations, promoting ease of maintenance and future upgrades. This allowed us to rationalize the number of custom components from more than 300 to fewer than 100. Accenture also helped BT integrate business processes such as Business Expense and Cash Management with the new Oracle financials platform, eliminating the need to maintain separate systems.

RESULTS

By integrating business processes with financial data standards and operational tools, the new platform provides BT Spain with robust financial and operational reporting capabilities, as well as standard and efficient business processes. It also helps in implementing financial data standards and sharing key financial data across the company. As a system with reduced customizations, it will be easy to upgrade with subsequent Oracle software releases.

Additionally, the cost-competitive implementation helped BT Spain meet the tight schedule to attain Single European Payment Area (SEPA) compliance. The Spanish Oracle upgrade experience is also likely to help BT in its global R12 upgrade as the configuration can serve as a base for a global template.