Accenture: Bringing AI to the business with flexibility and scale in the cloud
Transformation powered by a digital core with clean principles
Accenture runs its internal mission-critical processes seamlessly and at scale with SAP solutions, empowering more than 774,000 employees to focus on helping their clients reinvent their organizations. Now, moving into the cloud with RISE with SAP is helping Accenture drive significant efficiency gains and pursue new opportunities with AI.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Professional Services | Dublin, Ireland | 774,000 |
Faster creation of financial narratives with generative AI
Faster corporate allocations at month-end
Hours saved by finance teams during the first 12 months with AI-infused solutions
Managing Director, Global IT, Finance Platforms, Accenture
Let there be change
With a mantra of “Let there be change,” Accenture helps customers in every industry across more than 120 countries reimagine, reinvent, and transform their businesses for the better. Technology often plays a central role in these transformation initiatives, and SAP is one of Accenture’s most important partners in helping to deliver the powerful, scalable, and versatile platforms that its clients need.
Accenture doesn’t just design and implement SAP solutions for its clients – it also depends on these solutions to run, optimize, and transform its own business. With one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated global SAP S/4HANA Cloud environments, Accenture uses its SAP applications to manage almost every aspect of its finance and procurement processes.
“With SAP, we don’t have to be the world’s greatest experts at posting a journal or running a statutory report,” says Michalene Schechter, Director, Global IT, SAP Platform Architecture at Accenture. “We can rely on SAP to do that for us. This frees us up to focus on innovation and on the differentiators that will allow us to bring the best solutions to our business and ultimately to our clients.”
As the company has seen tremendous growth, the complexity of its SAP environment rapidly increased. Thousands of lines of custom code in its core finance systems made upgrades resource-intensive and hindered initiatives to innovate with new technologies such as SAP Business AI. Moreover, many of the customizations were complex, lacked traceability, and were performance-intensive. For example, processing corporate allocations took more than 30 hours each month.
Chief Information and Asset Engineering Officer, Accenture
Building a Digital Core with Clean Principles
Accenture launched a strategy called Clean Digital Core, which would compress the transformation of its core financial systems to deliver value much faster, reduce complexity, and allow easier access to innovation.
By harnessing RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, Accenture would be able to remove hundreds of customizations from the core of its ERP applications and replace them either with out-of-the-box SAP solutions or with clean, easily maintainable extensions and integrations developed through SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
In addition, by shifting from on-premises infrastructure to a fully managed cloud platform, the RISE with SAP solution would provide a key staging post in Accenture’s broader journey towards public cloud.
Eli Lambert, Managing Director, Global IT, Finance Platforms at Accenture, explains: “RISE with SAP allows us to consume technology, not own it. We benefit from the tech-managed services that SAP provides to provision, monitor, and maintain our infrastructure. That allows us to continue to evolve our talent strategy so we can pivot our people’s focus to higher-value innovations.”
Managing Director, Global IT, Finance Platforms, Accenture
Faster, simpler financial processes
With its Digital Core strategy, Accenture has been able to remove 21% of the custom code from its core SAP applications within just six months – reducing complexity and improving performance.
For example, the corporate allocations process that used to depend on core modifications is now handled by the SAP Profitability and Performance Management Cloud solution. This has accelerated the process by 50%, saving critical time at month-end and helping Accenture compress its global financial close process from five days to just three when needed.
Similarly, the new platform has made it easy for Accenture to adopt the SAP Cash Application solution, which provides AI-powered matching of receivables out of the box. This has doubled the automatic clearing rate for incoming payments. To support its global business Accenture has also developed a new Cash Application Scheduler using SAP BTP, which provided an additional 7% increase in auto-clearing and delivers information to SAP S/4HANA 77% faster.
Director, Global IT, SAP Platform Architecture, Accenture
Innovating with embedded AI
The Digital Core strategy means Accenture’s finance and IT teams spend less time on systems maintenance and management, and more time helping the business innovate. This has already borne fruit with the development of an Intelligent Financial Advisor (IFA), built using SAP BTP and SAP Business AI.
The IFA provides an AI-infused variance report that automatically notifies Accenture’s controllers via Microsoft Teams when it detects discrepancies or risks in the company’s financial figures – giving them the insight to be able to take decisive action when time is at a premium during the critical pre-close period.
The IFA also uses generative AI to automate the creation of narrative summaries for financial reporting. The AI is now capable of generating variance analysis commentaries with an approval rate of 91%, which saves controllers huge amounts of time – totaling 57,000 hours globally in the first 12 months after deployment.
Finally, Accenture has created an Intelligent Cash Solution for its global treasury department using SAP S/4HANA and the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. “It lets us think about cash almost like manufacturing companies think about stock,” says Michalene Schechter. “With its predictive algorithms, we now have 95% accuracy in our cash management, which has allowed us to free up 20% of our idle cash flow.”
Looking to the future, Accenture’s vision is to shift its ERP landscape into the public cloud with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. “We’re using SAP Signavio solutions to break down silos of institutional knowledge and elevate our overall understanding of our SAP environment – both where we are now and where we want to go in the future,” concludes Michalene Schechter. “Our data-driven approach is enabling us to pinpoint with laser precision where we need to focus so that we can bring value to our business every step of the way.”