Digitizing business services

Moving from the old to a new digital business services suite to create additional value was a multi-year journey. The focus was on developing practical solutions using tools and technologies to support how we manage our entire business.

We wanted to give our client account, sales and delivery teams everything they need to perform on their best day. We also recognized that, while technology is vital, on its own it’s not enough to drive transformation. We needed our people to work in new ways and use the technology to the fullest to drive the best outcomes.

Working together with the business, the Accenture global IT team created a structured and integrated framework to address every area of the Accenture business and operations—reinventing processes for account planning, forecasting, sales, pricing, revenue management and reporting.

Our change management team was there on the journey to prepare and support our people to use the technology and processes so that they could better manage client accounts, sell more work and deliver on the contract.

Introducing any new technology is not without its challenges. One of the biggest challenges is getting people to use technology’s full capabilities—when people are busy, they naturally prefer to use the tools and processes that are familiar to them.

With many new and updated processes, change and adoption activities needed to be tailored to specific audiences to be effective. Using a role-based, person-centric approach, we relied on the support of our sponsors and leaders to identify what was needed. We then focused our efforts on engaging people with the new, necessary behaviors and changes. The approach empowered our people with digital ways of working.

Here’s how we did it:

• Active sponsorship from visionary leaders: We worked with our sponsors and leaders to understand the “north star”—the desired business outcomes and value from reimagining business services. Then we determined the new behaviors, as well as the technology and process changes that were necessary to achieve success. We used a partnership model, bringing together technology and the business.
• Audience-specific engagement approach: We introduced clear and easy guidance to move along the technology change journey by developing audience-specific engagement and marketing, just-in-time training and ongoing process support. We helped our people understand the “why” not just the “how” behind technology change. We explained the benefits of the technology and how it integrates into the ways they already work.
• Identified adoption and success measures: We engaged our sponsors and leaders to set adoption success and business-based outcome targets. These enabled us to monitor and adjust change interventions to reach our north star goal quickly and efficiently.

We have improved the processes around market management, account management, forecasting and talent.

Here’s how we did it:

• Eased performance management: Client group and market leaders now understand how their business is performing and make informed, data-driven decisions. Executives are able to interact directly with their business data to assess historic and projected future performance and access a common set of metrics and a “single source of the truth” for all decision making.
• Automated future forecasting: Sales and revenue data comes together in a new online, automated and forward-looking forecasting capability that improves forecast quality and provides instant visibility and consolidation for Finance and business unit leads.
• Improved team and roster management: Enhanced analytics and business insights drive efficiencies, simplify processes and improve productivity for complex team management activities. Customized solutions are available for our client teams across Accenture.

Our digital business services have brought digital capabilities to our business leaders, client account teams and supporting functions. We have transformed how we work, creating experiences that are individualized and intelligent and enable successful outcomes with a robust change management and adoption approach.

We have tackled internal inefficiencies and unleashed the power of global connection. For instance, the critical foundation for the digitization of our business was the fact that we had a global single-instance SAP S/4HANA® enterprise system which provides full data integrity and a “single source of the truth.”

Now, our cross-platform technologies mean that our client account teams spend less time on administration and can work faster and more effectively.