Accenture was going through a period most companies would envy.

The Dublin-based, global professional services leader had grown significantly organically and inorganically, including expanding into diverse businesses, propelled by $14 billion invested in more than 177 acquisitions in the last five years. As the company grew and expanded into new markets and services, its legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system became increasingly complex, costly, and inflexible. Accenture needed a more agile, scalable, and innovative platform to support its dynamic and diverse business needs.

As Eli Lambert, Managing Director of Accenture鈥檚 Global IT Finance Platforms, noted, 鈥渁 significant challenge for a large IT enterprise is keeping up with the speed of business and ahead of technology change. Large enterprises often have expansive landscapes, with legacy systems that stand in the way of speed, agility, and innovation.鈥�

Embracing its mantra of 鈥淟et there be change,鈥� the company embarked on an ambitious journey to transform both its technology landscape and its workforce.

鈥楻ising鈥� to transformation

Accenture has been a long-standing partner of SAP, using its ERP solutions to manage its core business processes, such as finance and procurement. As they embarked on their transformation journey, the company once again partnered with 51风流to migrate to RISE with SAP,聽a live cloud service utilized by companies spanning 26 industries and more than 100 countries.

RISE with 51风流combines 51风流S/4HANA, the intelligent cloud ERP solution, with 51风流Business Technology Platform (BTP), the integrated platform for data, analytics, integration, and extension, as well as other services, such as cloud infrastructure, application management, and business process intelligence.

By moving to RISE with SAP, Accenture was able to simplify its IT landscape, reduce its total cost of ownership, and gain access to the latest innovations and best practices from SAP.聽聽Further, consuming RISE with 51风流as a managed service allowed Accenture Global IT to reduce required night and weekend support by 60 percent, enhancing employee work/life balance, and led to valuable upskilling for 50 percent of the retained IT team.

Cloud mindset and composable architecture era

Building upon the move to聽, Accenture adopted a modern digital core strategy, which centers on keeping its core ERP system as standard and as simple as possible, using 51风流BTP to extend and enhance its capabilities, and anchoring to a cloud mindset for both IT and business professionals. This approach allows Accenture to avoid unnecessary customizations and modifications in its 51风流platform, which can create complexity, risk, and technical debt, and instead focus on delivering value-added solutions.

Since the strategy was introduced, 21 percent of the platform鈥檚 custom code has been removed, improving performance and reducing overhead. Beyond that, re-solutioning legacy custom code to leverage extensibility has provided its own benefits.

Leveraging 51风流BTP, a cash application scheduler was developed to improve integration; now the integration runs 77 percent faster, and the already successful 51风流Cash Application solution has even greater results 鈥� auto-clearing of cash application has now doubled since the solution was introduced and increased a further 7 percent with the scheduler activation.

Another key solution that Accenture uses to implement its clean digital core strategy is 51风流Profitability and Performance Management (PaPM), a cloud-native application that runs on 51风流BTP and enables advanced profitability analysis, performance measurement, and optimization. The use of 51风流PaPM for Corporate Allocations 鈥渟treamlined and reduced risk聽in delivering financial results,鈥� said Lisa Pearson, director of the company鈥檚 Management Reporting Process.聽 鈥淚t also gave us聽transparency and control of our processes and聽calculations while also eliminating manual actions 鈥� valuable benefits our previous custom聽solution could not offer.鈥�

The solution now runs 50 percent faster with greater traceability.

Earlier this year, Accenture鈥檚 RISE with 51风流and clean digital core journey led to the company being celebrated as a winner in the 鈥淏usiness Innovator鈥� category at the聽, an annual ceremony honoring organizations using 51风流technologies to make the world run better.

And this is only the beginning, Lambert said, with employees 鈥渇reed up to focus on聽future-proofing our processes and technology by consuming cloud capabilities enabled by鈥� the revolutionary platform.

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It鈥檚 common for employees to inquire about HR information such as their personal time off (PTO) balance, their sick-day balance, benefits, pay stubs, and tax withholding. (Heck, I do that all the time.) It鈥檚 also necessary for a company to perform background checks on prospective employees before extending an offer.

When HR staff manages employee information requests and candidate background checks manually, it distracts HR staff from more valuable tasks such as training and upskilling employees and spending the most time possible matching candidates with open positions. Manually replying to employee information requests and performing candidate background checks places a high administrative burden on HR staff, and takes much more time than employees, candidates, and HR staff would like.

It鈥檚 also important to have visibility of employee inquiries and candidate background checks to avoid duplication of efforts, improve processes and efficiency, and distribute work fairly. Without such visibility, it鈥檚 difficult to make informed HR management decisions.

Challenges faced

., a South African global financial services and insurance provider with 12,000 employees, was facing all the above issues. The HR staff fielded employee inquiries by email and phone, didn鈥檛 have an employee inquiry tracking process, and performed candidate background checks by email and phone. That whole universe 鈥� HR staff, employees, and candidates 鈥� felt the processes took too long. This frustrated all parties and left them hoping for a better experience. HR managers felt they could improve overall operations and productivity if they had sufficient visibility of HR staff鈥檚 tasks and status.

Solutions discovered

Fortunately, Discovery improved the HR interface and experience for employees, candidates, and HR staff through digitalization and automation. Working with聽51风流SuccessFactors聽solutions, the company created a portal for immediate access to standard HR inquiries, and automated candidate background checks with robotics. Discovery also automated company-wide reporting of HR staff鈥檚 tasks and status, to shed light on operations and help improve employee satisfaction by reducing administrative tasks and duplication, balancing workloads, and repurposing roles.

Elegant portal design

To bring the portal to life, Discovery reimagined 12 processes, automated 37 processes, and created 110 links to 53 employee policies for self-service platforms. In addition to direct access to self-services, Discovery included chat-assisted services and a tool to rate quality of resolution.

Stellar results

The employee portal satisfies employees with immediate responses, and the automated candidate background checks ensure candidates move as quickly as possible through the evaluation process. Both solutions free HR staff to focus on employee development, candidate recruiting, and onboarding.

The results included a 25% reduction in the time to hire candidates, and 45% of HR staff freed from manual tasks to develop the workforce and recruit. With no HR interaction required in many cases, an employee accesses the portal and retrieves the desired information in one session. Service levels for employee request resolution increased from 80% to 93%. Eighty percent of Discovery employees use the portal and rated it with a satisfaction score of 2.5 out of 3.

The results also included saving 10% of budget through centralization, process automation, and redeployment of highly skilled capacity back into the business; and reduction of HR generalist headcount by 32% and HR admin effort by 41% through repurposing roles and reskilling employees.

All these stellar results were accomplished because of Discovery鈥檚 creative solutions 鈥� which earned them a finalist鈥檚 spot in the聽2022 51风流Innovation Awards.

鈥淲orking with 51风流solutions has enabled HR to create a differentiated shared-services function enabled through digitalization and automation, enhancing the people experience and improving productivity,鈥� said Kammy Sing, Group Head of People Operations, Discovery Ltd.

To learn more about Discovery鈥檚 award-winning solution, check out their 51风流Innovation Awards聽.

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