Accenture helps Siemens take commercial project management to the next level by harmonizing global project data and introducing powerful applications.
The financial planning and analysis of commercial projects’ status and risks play a crucial role in helping large companies like Siemens support C-level decision-making. Many industrial companies, however, still struggle to control, monitor and report on internal and external customer projects across business units. Often, they do not have integrated solutions that allow them to gain a comprehensive view of project data and the knock-on effects for quality and cost.
Integrating and digitizing commercial project planning capabilities with the right tools would help industrial companies enhance commercial insights, improve risk mitigation and speed decision-making—as well as increase financial performance.
Siemens is a global powerhouse focused on electrification, automation and digitalization. Co-headquartered in Berlin and Munich, Germany, the company operates in almost all countries and, with almost 383,000 employees, has annual sales of €87 billion (as of September 30, 2019). Siemens manages up to 20 million projects worldwide for its businesses and customers across multiple divisions. Activities range from software creation and machine maintenance services to train assembly and power plant construction. The corresponding project financials are spread across nearly 20 SAP enterprise resource planning systems worldwide and another 20 additional non-SAP partner systems.
The fragmented systems meant that the company had little insight into project portfolio status, risks and forecasts without considerable manual effort in collecting and interpreting the data. Business units or divisions had different key performance indicators, which made it difficult for the company to compare apples to apples and determine the root cause of issues. As a result, Siemens identified the need for one global unified financial forecasting and reporting solution across divisions to better manage commercial projects and risks.
Siemens teamed up with Accenture to take commercial project planning and controlling to the next level with a new SAP enterprise performance management solution. The solution layers a complex planning and flexible reporting functionality on top of an SAP HANA data lake with centrally harmonized project data.
Siemens now has one global unified solution for project financial forecasting and real-time reporting across divisions.
Along with more than 50 dashboards that support the full project life cycle and mitigate challenges like intercompany eliminations, currency conversion, distribution functions and complex calculations, the solution provides:
A unified view of data that is enriched and integrated from different sources.
Standardized KPIs across divisions, using harmonized data, to make project details easily comparable and facilitate automated data collection and reporting.
KPI forecasting fed by automated data provision.
Standardized and flexible reports for analysis using the latest SAP technologies and covering financial data, risks and opportunities, milestones and changes.
Interfaces that help partner systems push or pull data easily via web services.
"With Accenture's help, we now have a bird's eye view of what's happening across countries. Already, the efficiency gains have helped us save money and focus our people on where are needed most."
– ERIK MOHR, Siemens IT Leadership Team Member & Head of IT Application Platforms and Digital Solutions
The new capabilities are helping Siemens increase competitiveness, as well as:
Save money through improved efficiencies and strategic insights.
Mitigate risk by identifying difficult project situations early to act swiftly and consistently.
Support complex financial decision-making and financial planning with high-quality, consistent data.
Reduce employee workload and potential errors, allowing them to focus on more valuable activities.
Lay the foundation to create more sophisticated and innovative analytics and risk management capabilities.
filter result
Client Account Lead for Siemens Corporate IT
ProjectDAsh Delivery Lead, and Head of SAP Enterprise Performance Management, ASG
ProjectDAsh Development Lead & Scrum Master, and Product Champion SAP Planning - ASG
