How to use powerful partnerships to advance operations maturity

Mi casa es tu casa. What’s ours is yours.

For Accenture, this is much more than a throw-away phrase. It sits at the heart of how we deliver for clients. As enterprises embrace intelligent operations, we make our experiences, methodologies and assets available to them to kick-start their transformation. This is a strategic collaboration, where our enterprise becomes an extension of clients’ business.

This is a new way of working for many companies, particularly when it comes to core areas such as finance, talent and human resources (HR), supply chain and procurement, marketing, etc. And CXOs are keen to know how best to capitalize on their partners’ investments in data, systems and talent to achieve better outcomes.

When experience meets process

In answering this question, CXOs should start by assessing their current operations maturity. Accenture research revealed four levels of maturity: stable, efficient, predictive and future-ready. Each level is enabled by progressively more sophisticated processes, technology, talent, and data insights.

The further up this index companies move—as defined by their use of advanced technologies that drive efficiency, insights and capability—the more profitable they become. We found that organizations that apply tech-driven operational intelligence show a 2.8x boost in profitability and 1.7x higher efficiency than less mature organizations.

Enriching operations through ecosystem partnerships

Business leaders know that the right ecosystem partnership can help an organization accelerate its operations maturity.  The right partner brings complementary skillsets and more diverse data. Together, they foster continuous evolution instead of one-time, project-focused improvements and offer advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. These ecosystems will increasingly be used to source a growing range of automation, analytics and AI capabilities. CXOs should focus on finding partners that are already part of a rich collaboration ecosystem, and which can deliver industry-specific solutions across vital areas such as cloud, platform, automation and intelligence.

The benefits of this approach are clear. For example, Accenture’s SynOps platform, which leverages ecosystem plays, has delivered clients a wide range of operational upticks, including:

• • more than $17 billion profit and loss (P&L) value delivered
  • 85%+improvements in balance sheet integrity
  • 95%+ increase in forecast accuracy
  • 30% efficiency savings over two years and 60% over five

Five crucial steps to optimize your ecosystem relationship

How can business leaders work with a strategic partner to get the most value out of their operations transformation? Broadly speaking there are five key steps:

1. 1. Scope transformation. Some organizations may wish to start with outsourced operations, while others may look to include retained and/or captive operations. Focus on end-to-end process transformation vs. task automation. There will also need to be a discovery phase where you run proof of concept trials and leverage use cases.
   2. Decide on commercial model. Select the best commercial structure to ensure the platform services you buy deliver for your business. Options include fixed fee, performance-linked fees or variable fee components etc.
   3. Configure, customize and implement technology. Integrate the tools and assets with the investments made into your technology landscape and to have comprehensive solutions and realize value faster.
   4. Plan to maintain. Consider using maintenance and hosting services provided by your partner, such as Command Center capabilities, as they may deliver additional insights to help improve your operations over time and keep them future-ready.
   5. Reskill talent. Digital transformation requires talent transformation to improve employee experience and to further enable digital capabilities. Deliver a skilling program that prepared your people for the future of work.

Thanks to advances in technology and the emergence of rich ecosystem plays, functional and business teams no longer need to go it alone. Working with collaborators like Accenture that can fast-track their move to future-ready operations and provide them with the data-driven insights to outsmart, outperform and outpace their competition.

Where is your organization on its operations maturity journey today?

Find out using our quick diagnostic tool. Upon receiving your personalized scorecard that identifies how your organization’s operating model scores against our four levels, I invite you to reach out to discuss any questions you may have at manoj.shroff@accenture.com or on LinkedIn.