Achieving excellence in F&A digital capability platform solutions

Simply cutting costs no longer cuts it for Finance & Accounting (F&A) professionals trying to weather today’s volatile business climate. CFOs need to reorient themselves from just focusing on the bottom line to pushing the frontlines of growth.

That’s why, in partnership with our clients, we’ve been turning F&A into an intelligent function that is proactive, forward looking and not reactive, backward looking.

It’s a full digital transformation that gives companies the real-time insights they need to gain a competitive edge. And since we can automate up to 80% of processes, finance professionals finally have time to strategize, analyze and innovate across their entire organizations — something they are particularly well-suited to do, since finance is at the beginning and end of every corporate endeavor.

As the F&A Outsourcing industry shifts to a digital-first model, the Everest Group has developed the Digital Capability Platform (DCP) — a framework that depicts the digital ecosystem with multiple levers, each addressing different buyer needs. While individual digital components such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and analytics are important, the impact is much higher when they are integrated and implemented collectively as a suite.

I am delighted that the Everest Group has named Accenture the Overall Leader — in both Market Impact and Vision & Capability — in its F&A DCP Solutions PEAK Matrix Assessment for 2020.

What exactly does that mean? Market Impact takes into account market adoption, portfolio mix and value delivered.

Vision & Capability measures vision and strategy, the scope of services the company offers, innovation and investments and delivery footprint.

This award is strong confirmation that we are reaching our goal of leveraging technology and digital assets to enable our clients to create much more value in their organizations.

The Everest Group report called out how we pursue “flexible engagement and commercial models to accelerate adoption among clients.” That’s a particularly validating comment, since we always aspire to co-create solutions with clients. That way, their employees can voice their suggestions and concerns — and share ownership.   

Here’s what else Everest noted:  

• We follow a business transformation approach using our SynOps framework that leverages data from multiple sources, domain/industry expertise, automation and AI, work orchestration, and insights and intelligence to help clients achieve business outcomes.
• Our data integration hub collates and cleanses structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data to increase proper utilization of data from multiple internal sources (ERP, CRM, etc.) and external sources (social media, news, etc.)
• We improved our Intelligent Automation Platform (IAP) with multiple integrated tools such as automation, AI and analytics, and interactive dashboards (for KPI tracking and benchmarking), an end-to-end approach to transforming the F&A function.
• We’ve enhanced our multiple modular predictive and prescriptive analytics solutions such as Intelligent Collection 3.0 and Collections Concierge, leveraging supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms.
• And we’ve also increased our focus on customer experience through investments in Digital Intelligent Virtual Assistant, an AI orchestration platform which is used for service orchestration, information extraction, classification and intelligent learning. Clients can even make decisions on the go via mobile apps.

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This recognition is really a testament to our people, and their ability to empower clients to deliver innovative ideas and results that were previously unimaginable. Now, we’re inspired to push our F&A capabilities even further to drive business outcomes for our clients.

If you have any questions about the Everest Group findings — or if you’d like to explore how to transform your finance function — feel free to reach me via email at manoj.shroff@accenture.com or on LinkedIn,  or Sanchit Agarwal via email at sanchit.b.agarwal@accenture.com or LinkedIn.