Delivering success in the cloud

Futureproofing public services

Poste Italiane is a public company that operates more than 12,000 branches and employs 129,000 people. Each of its businesses—including postal, banking, telecommunications, and insurance—had its own IT department and customized applications, creating a costly, cumbersome technology infrastructure. Under pressure to deliver more efficient services, Poste Italiane decided to consolidate accounting data from seven systems on to SAP S/4HANA®, creating a centralized controlling model to simplify and standardize all internal administrative, financial, and accounting processes hosted on Microsoft Azure cloud. The transformation aimed to improve data quality, reduce costs, and speed up transactions to give greater control over monthly closures and other processes.

Staggering a big impact transformation

With a majority stake in the project Accenture owned the governance, accounting, fiscal, finance and technology architecture, closely aligning with consortium partners to ensure consistency. Thanks to strong governance, the program continued smoothly when the pandemic struck. Using an SAP S/4HANA® template created by SAP®, Accenture reviewed all business processes with a collaborative team of more than 200 people to ensure standardized functionality was used where possible. The resulting blueprints were finalized with key stakeholders, and SAP and Microsoft delivered quality assurance. Accenture ran simulations covering the main business processes and an integration test using millions of records before the solution was deployed on schedule in the postal and banking businesses. Go-lives were phased for the other businesses, with 300 new functions deployed in between.

Increasing transparency with centralized services

Poste Italiane’s streamlined chart of accounts has reduced in size by 11% and customization has reduced by 90%. Data is acquired in the new SAP system directly from master legacy platforms, ensuring a single, higher quality source of truth. Data extraction is also standardized, enabling more flexible data management and reporting, while the SAP Fiori® application provides access to business data across multiple channels. Poste Italiane has been able to reallocate 20% of sales and procurement people to other business areas in need of resources as a result. Combined with the fact 70% of control processes are now automated, these efficiencies have led to annual business savings of €2 million.