Transforming Accenture s core HR systems: Setting the stage for a digital Accenture

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1 Transforming Accenture s core HR systems: Setting the stage for a digital Accenture

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3 Client profile Accenture s internal IT organization is charged with driving the company s digital agenda. Building on the legacy of a notable IT transformation, the organization is focused on three key roles: aligning IT with business priorities, enabling a digital Accenture and driving down the cost of IT. Accenture must put in place the technologies that provide its more than 336,000 employees with access to the information and capabilities to be a high-performance business. 3

4 Opportunity Over the last 10 years, Accenture has grown rapidly from 65,000 to more than 300,000 employees with offices and operations in more than 200 cities in 56 countries. The company s success is significantly based on the ability of its global workforce to deliver high performance to its clients. Robust and flexible human resources (HR) systems are critical to attract, develop, manage, deploy and compensate Accenture s employees. Accenture s legacy HR systems were built when Accenture was a partnership and during a period of rapid global expansion in the 1990s, when they were customized and localized to support new outsourcing and business process models. Accenture realized that it needed to develop an integrated HR solution that would not only support the company s growth, but serve as a strong foundation for becoming a digital business and providing a competitive advantage. Accenture began developing integrated, global HR processes that would provide seamless integration across the company and superior HR reporting and analysis functions. This solution also needed to be flexible enough to support the company s evolving HR needs. Solution To deliver a highly effective, global HR capability that would be flexible enough to grow and change with the company over time, Accenture developed a solution based on SAP Human Capital Management technology, utilizing three SAP modules Personnel Administration, Organizational Administration and the Qualifications Module. The SAP HR solution was significantly integrated with other systems both through web services and batch integration. In line with its own best practice principles, Accenture s goal was to maximize the data resident in its single, global SAP instance (integrated with Finance and Sales) to drive digital HR capabilities. The HR solution ensures that business-critical employee data is made available to approximately 250 downstream applications such as those related to travel, benefits, office management, equity management and payroll. The HR operations team, in close liaison with the business, is responsible for ensuring seamless integration with other applications and systems as they come on board. For example, Accenture s Global Recruiting capability integrates with the SAP HR solution, automating the flow of new-hire data. Rather than focusing on software solutions that would improve performance in discrete functional areas, Accenture defined requirements for establishing best-in-class, end-to-end HR processes that would drive improvements in key areas such as hiring, forecasting, management reporting and compensation. The goal was to implement a system integrated with Finance that would not only support Accenture s efforts to position HR as a strategic partner with the business, but also establish a platform for driving high-performance business results and digital operations. To develop the HR solution, Accenture assembled a global team, comprised of people from the company s HR and internal IT organization, the Consulting workforce and Accenture s 38,000-strong SAP practice. The extended team included key HR personnel representing 48 countries. This group s involvement was critical, since most HR activities occur at the country level. Accenture worked closely with these local resources to understand and address varying business practices and security concerns such as those associated with data privacy and trans-border data flows. 4

5 During the IT system build phase, Accenture extended the team further with resources from the Accenture Delivery Centers in the Philippines, India and Spain. These people, particularly skilled in SAP development projects, were instrumental in building new reporting capabilities, carrying out system configuration and conversion activities, and keeping implementation costs low. Following an intensive four-month global design phase involving a number of stakeholders and the creation of several prototypes, the team spent five months configuring the SAP IT solution. They then conducted three full mock data conversions and all appropriate system tests before migrating to the new SAP system. The team also cleansed more than 210,000 existing employee records and assigned each employee a new eight-digit personnel number. A system implementation of this size and scope required the team to apply well-orchestrated change management practices. Early in the project, the team called on Accenture experts in talent and organization performance to develop a comprehensive change strategy. Alejandra Brandolin, Accenture managing director leading the SAP HR Shared Services team, explained, By spending time understanding the needs of our audiences particularly the thousands of end users of HR information we helped our people focus on the changes they needed to make and did not overwhelm them with irrelevant information. Working closely with 10 geographic training teams, Accenture s talent and organization performance professionals conducted face-to-face training sessions with key users. By spending time understanding the needs of our audiences particularly the thousands of end users of HR information we helped our people focus on the changes they needed to make and did not overwhelm them with irrelevant information. 5

6 Results The new HR system has enabled greater HR efficiencies across the organization by having one source of the truth, while the one database and one application significantly reduced IT costs. In addition, the new system provides a global, flexible and scalable personnel administration capability that not only answers Accenture s need for geographic specificity, but also supports the company s digital agenda and plans for growth. Since the initial implementation, the solution has already demonstrated its flexibility through a seamless upgrade implementation and integration across a changing spectrum of applications to continuously improve data integrity. For example, more than 38,000 self-service updates are made by employees each month through the myrequests application via web services. Users can access transactional data in real time across a range of business processes including personal HR information, time and expense reporting and skills management. The adoption of these self-service applications, coupled with the industrialization of key processes has reduced the operations team by half. Leveraging these standardized processes has allowed Accenture to further utilize its global, lower-cost shared service centers to handle repeatable personnel administration transactions. Supported by an ongoing program of HR transformation, this has enabled Accenture to achieve an ongoing reduction in HR cost year-onyear as a percentage of net revenue. Equally impressive, IT costs have been reduced even though Accenture has added significantly more capability and usage of the system. Accenture is now able to quickly and efficiently bring new functionality onto the HR system, incorporate newly acquired businesses into the company structure and quickly respond to periodic restructuring. For example, Accenture has been able to smoothly integrate 20 acquisitions into its structure within a two-year period. The HR solution also allowed Accenture to decouple the SAP Organizational Hierarchy from the Financial Hierarchy providing enhanced HR reporting and supporting Accenture s evolving business model. The solution integrates HR and Finance data in a single instance of SAP, providing access to consistent, highly accurate, global information that drives analytics to support decision making and employee services across the enterprise. Access to the same data across Finance and HR also facilitates the creation of a standard set of processes and more rigorous internal control procedures. According to Todd Harding, Managing Director of Global Operations Programs and Reporting, Our SAP implementation has brought the Finance and HR teams closer together. We work now in a more integrated way and this helps optimize end-toend business processes. The success of this major HR transformation was evident in the value it delivered. According to Dan Kirner, Global Managing Director of Accenture Applications, Given the sheer scale of the program, we placed a heavy focus on change management and meticulous design work. Our efforts paid off when we confirmed that our employees experienced no interruptions to benefits or services. Just as we had planned. Several factors contributed to the success of this implementation, especially Accenture s deep expertise in SAP solutions and proven systems integration practices, as well as its rigorous solution delivery methodologies and tools. Accenture was also able to tap resources from its long-standing alliance partners, SAP and Microsoft, to help ensure quick problem resolution and accelerate solution development and delivery. 6

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8 About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 336,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, Its home page is Copyright 2015 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture