Finance & Performance Management Services · 2015-05-23 · Finance & Performance Management...

Finance & Performance Management ServicesHelping organizations master the finance capabilities that drive high performance

2 | Finance & Performance Management Services

Acknowledged as an industry leader, Accenture offers market-tested solutions, services and assets in corporate finance, finance operations, enterprise performance management and risk management. Accenture helps companies across all industries drive down costs in their finance organizations, while creating finance and performance management capabilities that enhance control, improve risk mitigation and create the kind of long-term business value that achieves high performance.

Finance & Performance Management Services | 3

Challenged by difficult economic times and by a broader global competitive environment, businesses and governments are increasingly turning to their finance organizations for better cost control and risk management—and for innovative ways to improve overall business performance. Chief financial officers are spending ever-greater portions of their time on strategy and leadership, while intensifying their focus on finance and accounting fundamentals in response to cost pressures, heightened regulatory scrutiny and demands for greater transparency.

The finance organization has a huge impact both on the short-term competitiveness of an enterprise as well as its long-term viability. Accenture research has demonstrated a strong correlation between those companies with high-performance finance organizations and those that exceed their peers in overall business performance. The best finance

organizations contribute directly to the manner in which the enterprise as a whole pursues profitable growth.

The challenge companies face is how to leverage new strategies, technologies, methods and skilled talent on a consistent basis to create a finance organization that provides adequate controls and risk mitigation, while supporting the kinds of business ventures that support high performance. For all such companies, Accenture offers unparalleled services, deeply skilled resources and innovative offerings that have already delivered measurable improvements in business performance for organizations in almost every industry.

We have the breadth of experience, global delivery capabilities, superior assets, deep knowledge and research-based insights to help chief financial officers manage costs and drive profitable growth to keep them on the path to high performance.

The critical role of the finance organization in driving high performance


A host of pressing challenges, on top of an already-full agenda, currently confront CFOs in today’s hypercompetitive world—one buffeted by economic pressures, the rise of globalization and a decreasing pool of qualified talent.

With the advent of the multi-polar world, where the centers of economic might have become increasingly distributed around the globe, managing the financial organization of the enterprise across borders and time zones has grown increasingly complex, particularly if the enterprise wishes to compete and excel by developing new capabilities and business models to take advantage of all the opportunities the new global environment has to offer.

Recent Accenture research—the Accenture High Performance Finance Study 2008—has highlighted four particular challenges faced by CFOs and their finance organizations in this multi-polar world.

Cost controlIn the face of an economic downturn, CFOs are under increased pressure to reduce costs. To meet immediate challenges while still delivering the value the enterprise and its stakeholders increasingly demand, CFOs must have a plan to reduce the cost structure of their finance operations, especially in non-core, transactional areas such as order/entry and commodity-type functions such as payroll.

CompetitionSome forms of cost pressure preceded the current financial crisis. For example, the face of global competition has been shifting for several years as more agile competitors have arisen that are capable of leveraging the built-in advantage of lower overheads in developing countries. To rise to the challenge of these new, cost-efficient competitors,

CFOs must modify (or, in some cases, transform) the finance infrastructure to enable their enterprise to enter new businesses and develop new strategies to respond to rapidly changing market dynamics. One of these overarching business strategies is to grow the enterprise by acquiring or merging with other companies in target markets, thereby obtaining new capabilities. This strategy requires determining the best ways to integrate workforces, financial processes, and varying or divergent information technology platforms into a new, common entity.

Risk managementTaking out cost from any organization comes with a considerable share of risks. So does acquiring new businesses that may become available at bargain prices during a recession. Yet, our research shows that risk management capabilities are often inadequate for the challenges ahead. Just 8 percent

Meeting today’s finance challenges


of the companies in the Accenture research study indicated they have a centralized, fully integrated risk management capability that is used uniformly across the enterprise. Improving enterprise risk management capabilities is essential as CFOs are confronted by new and perhaps unfamiliar regulatory requirements, while preparing for intensified scrutiny from financial markets, government agencies and shareholders.

Talent managementA multi-polar world presents both challenges and opportunities when it comes to attracting, developing, engaging and retaining workforce talent. Typically, organizations face a situation where there is simultaneously global abundance and local scarcity of top talent. To create a skilled finance workforce, CFOs must champion the development of a robust culture

focused on creating value for the shareholder and new global pools of talent and labor from which to draw in emerging markets and developing economies.

To help organizations meet these challenges and drive toward high performance, Accenture offers deep skills and resources and a broad suite of solutions and services. With distinctive, integrated offerings, we deliver end-to-end solutions through a finance and performance management service portfolio spanning finance strategy and capability development, finance operations, enterprise performance management and risk management.


Accenture’s broad and deep services in finance and performance management consulting and outsourcing deliver business impact within four integrated areas:

• Corporate Finance solutions assist CFOs in setting the agenda to create the necessary corporate finance capabilities that contribute to better performance for the enterprise as a whole.

• Finance Operations solutions focus on developing effective and efficient back-office capabilities to create the foundation for finance and performance management mastery.

• Enterprise Performance Management solutions enable organizations to link strategy with execution to produce sustainable, profitable returns, central to the strategic agenda of the enterprise.

• Risk Management solutions help organizations both mitigate the risks of negative events as well as encourage the positive, entrepreneurial initiatives that align risk and reward in search of high performance.

Accenture’s integrated finance and performance management services


Corporate FinanceOverviewAccenture Corporate Finance solutions help clients optimize their finance capabilities and direct them toward the organization’s most critical strategies. We can help CFOs enhance the corporate value of the business while balancing the associated risks of delivering in a highly competitive marketplace. Our distinctive services in this area include Finance Strategy, Tax Excellence, Treasury Operational Excellence and Trading Operations.

Finance Strategy Our finance strategy offering helps CFOs and their leadership teams align finance priorities with business priorities—and to put in place the tools, processes, workforce capabilities and organization structures to support those priorities. Our extensive strategic experience is augmented by additional services in the areas of organization and governance. Accenture’s distinctive skills in workforce transformation help clients develop and sustain the right skills and capabilities in their people to add maximum value to the enterprise.

Tax Excellence Accenture’s tax offering delivers solutions and services that enable our clients to create tax organizations capable of driving high performance for the enterprise as a whole. We have a broad suite of assets and accelerators to assist clients across multiple areas, including process improvement, data management, technology, organization design and workforce enablement.

Treasury Operational Excellence Our corporate treasury offering delivers innovative solutions to transform an organization’s finance and treasury functions. Our services assist clients in vital areas such as

defining leading practices in treasury organization structures and operations; cash management services; treasury system integration; and portfolio management.

Trading Operations Accenture’s trading offering leverages our deep industry knowledge in trading and risk management. The offering focuses on two primary areas. Accenture Commodity Trading Launch & Growth Services gives clients a rapid approach to entering energy commodity markets. Accenture Trading Diagnostics & Integration Services provides extensive business and systems analysis that supports new and existing trading organizations.

BenefitsAccenture’s Corporate Finance solutions help drive high performance for our clients by improving their ability to:

• Develop a deep, fact-based understanding of the existing finance function, organization and workforce against their market peers and then create a vision for how the finance function could deliver enhanced value in the future.

• Create tested, asset-powered solutions that deliver significant benefits through innovation, process improvements and leading-edge technologies tailored to the needs of the market and an organization’s industry.

• Achieve better alignment between the treasury function and the strategic objectives of the business so that CFOs can define and measure finance results within the broader strategic context of the organization.

High performance delivered: Accenture and PfizerWhen major pharmaceutical company Pfizer tripled its size after acquiring two other global companies, it turned to Accenture for help in optimizing its finance function. Pfizer’s annual revenues had skyrocketed, making it the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical company. With larger operations, however, came a far more challenging workload for Pfizer’s corporate tax division. That team faced a critical decision: hire more people or radically change the way they worked.

Working closely with Accenture, Pfizer chose to initiate an innovative transformation of the people, processes and technology supporting its entire tax function, achieving a 40 percent process improvement in the function’s performance within 12 months. Today, the division is successfully completing its work with roughly the same number of tax professionals it employed when the company was half its current size. Accenture’s ongoing research into high-performance business suggests that mastery of a functional area such as corporate tax can help the organization as a whole achieve high performance.

An important part of this initiative involved Accenture’s and Pfizer’s creation of a new corporate tax portal, a “virtual desktop” that is now the common starting place for every Pfizer tax professional each working day. The portal enables Pfizer’s people to access the latest divisional news, see projects at a glance, use shared templates and work processes, and reach the data and information they need in an efficient and effective way.


Finance OperationsOverviewAccenture research has found that the operational dimensions of the finance organization create the foundation for high-performance finance. Accordingly, Accenture’s Finance Operations solution supports CFOs with the planning and implementation of core back-office services, helping to increase operating efficiencies, improve service, drive cost reductions and align the finance function with specific business needs. Our distinctive finance operations services include Process Improvement, Organizational Analysis and Design, Finance and Accounting Outsourcing, and Enabling Technologies.

Process Improvement Organizations that invest in streamlining their finance processes can dramatically increase their operating efficiency. We help our clients look beyond the traditional finance transaction boundaries to deliver further benefits through end-to-end process connectivity and standardization. We support the transformation of critical processes such as purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, revenue assurance and record-to-report. We work closely with Accenture’s supply chain management practice to provide an end-to-end capability that can achieve greater efficiencies in the area of working capital, including inventory management, to help drive growth.

Organizational Analysis and Design Accenture research has found that finance masters do much more than simply process financial transactions faster and more cheaply, or take their shared services operations to a lower cost location. Instead, the high performers have made finance operations more strategic by internalizing the notion of process elimination: removing waste from end-to-end transaction processes,

which decreases cycle times and improves service to both internal and external customers. Toward that end, Accenture offers distinctive solutions that help organizations diagnose their existing organization, unlock additional hidden value and then design and implement new structures to realize targeted benefits. We focus on critical areas such as post-merger integration, shared services operating models, and optimizing SG&A (sales, general and administrative).

Finance and Accounting Outsourcing Outsourcing provides additional levers to a finance organization to improve efficiency and achieve high performance. While some enterprises begin with an internal shared services center and move to outsourcing as a second step, many others choose to leapfrog their peers and competitors by moving directly to an outsourcing model. As one of the industry’s leading finance and accounting Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers, Accenture helps clients achieve global scale, flexibility and improved finance operations at reduced cost.

Enabling Technologies Accenture helps organizations leverage and optimize their current investments in enterprise-wide systems, creating value in the areas of accounts payable, accounts receivable, general accounting, asset life cycle management and project accounting, period-end/year-end-close, and time and expense management. Our solutions are founded on our extensive knowledge of enterprise-wide finance systems, including Oracle and SAP, as well as our experiences with process improvement and finance operating models. We also help our clients in the design and implementation of efficiency enhancing technology platforms such as service-level management automation, optical character recognition, scanning and workflow systems.

BenefitsOur Finance Operations solutions help our clients drive toward high performance by helping them:

• Reduce finance costs as a percentage of revenue to enable finance agility without jeopardizing control.

• Achieve process excellence through leading practices, standardization, organization and measurement.

• Realize enduring benefits through sustainable operating models.

• Liberate capacity consumed by transaction administration to focus on growing and improving the business.

• Increase quality and decrease variability in service delivery through end-to-end processes that leverage the power of enabling technologies.

• Accelerate the integration and stabilization of new services, markets and businesses.

• Provide maximum efficiency in core finance functions, such as record-to-report, purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash.

• Establish a solid prerequisite foundation to position the finance function as a strategic partner through improved finance operations.

• Provide the disciplined oversight of financial, accounting and audit systems required for business support which helps avoid liability, fraud and unnecessary risk exposure.


High performance delivered: Accenture and SAPSAP—Europe’s leading software company and a dominant force in the global market for enterprise applications—discovered through an internal benchmarking study that, although all of its European locations were using SAP software, they were not all benefiting to the same degree. Processes were not standardized, and each location had reached different levels of maturity in deploying the system, leading to an inconsistent rollout of functionality.

To increase efficiency through process standardization and consistent software deployment, SAP decided to create a single, shared services model for its finance operations, and to realize additional savings by consolidating European operations in a low-cost center in Eastern Europe. SAP’s intention was to achieve greater

customer focus supported by service- level agreements, leading practices and an ongoing process of continuous improvement. The shared services approach would also achieve greater transparency, improved data quality and more rigorous internal control.

SAP asked Accenture initially to assist with the development of a vision and business case to demonstrate the value of the move to shared services. A joint SAP and Accenture team then redesigned the financial processes and created the process handbooks for the shared services center. Through group workshops, new processes were drafted and refined.

Accenture also drew on its experience in finance and performance management, as well as the experience of its network of European delivery centers for service management and delivery. Accenture used its own support tool, which integrates the company’s experience helping other clients move to shared services.

To date, the migration of SAP’s finance function has proceeded according to schedule and is delivering robust services and benefits to the company’s finance and accounting community. The new shared services center is helping SAP advance toward high performance in several ways, delivering significant benefits in terms of cost savings, streamlining of processes and greater efficiency in the way finance and accounting services are delivered.

Accenture research has found that the operational dimensions of the finance organization create the foundation for high-performance finance.


Enterprise Performance ManagementOverviewAdvanced enterprise performance management capabilities are essential to an organization’s ability to organize and manage effective finance functions within a department or division, or across the enterprise as a whole. Accenture’s Enterprise Performance Management offering can help companies improve their ability to organize, simplify and analyze relevant information across a balanced framework that includes financial, operational, customer, competitor/marketplace and employee components.

This integrated structure supports the development of rapid business insights and enhances business decision making among key stakeholders. It enables organizations to focus on both the current and future value of their tangible and intangible assets while providing access to the right information at the right levels within the organization.

Accenture’s Enterprise Performance Management offering includes Enterprise Performance Management Strategy; Metrics, Reporting and Analysis; Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting; Enterprise Analytics; and Enabling Technologies.

Enterprise Performance Management Strategy Accenture teams with clients to help them identify and understand shareholder value creation by using quantitative and qualitative proprietary methodologies, including our patented Total Return to Shareholder Analytics method and, for public-sector organizations, the Accenture Public Service Value Model. We offer services in the areas of shareholder value analysis, portfolio assessment, strategy mapping, value driver decomposition and target setting.

Metrics, Reporting and Analysis Accenture helps management teams create more effective organizations by leveraging asset-based solutions to define key metrics, designing a robust management rhythm that supports business reviews and action planning, and designing an integrated data environment that supports ease of use and accuracy. Accenture’s approach is enabled through the implementation of balanced scorecards and dashboards, simplified financial and management reporting processes, and advanced analytic capabilities enabled through business intelligence.

Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Effective finance organizations need to understand past performance and then translate trends and key findings into insights aligned to forward-looking targets and intended business results that are linked to the strategy and that can drive shareholder value. Accenture helps clients leverage driver-based planning models, shifting from traditional annual budgeting cycles to rolling forecasts that are reviewed and updated frequently as business needs dictate. Our planning, budgeting and forecasting subject-matter experts leverage assets to help organizations implement leading practices such as driver-based planning, which increases the participation of operational owners and helps create greater accountability throughout the organization.

Enterprise Analytics Accenture views enterprise analytics as an integrated framework that successfully encompasses people, processes and technology. When designed properly, enterprise analytics establishes a closed-loop performance management process supported by statistical and quantitative methodologies that generate insights from data. Accenture teams with organizations to determine how these insights will be used to support decision making, defines the skill sets required to translate information into

relevant business insight, selects and implements tools needed to capture and analyze information, and designs an organization to manage activities and outcomes.

Enabling Technologies Accenture assists clients to leverage and optimize their investments in enterprise performance management through the use of enabling technologies from market-leading vendors. We deliver benefits for organizations throughout the project life cycle by evaluating, selecting, analyzing, designing, testing and implementing the right solution based on unique business requirements.

BenefitsAccenture helps clients create and scale an integrated enterprise performance management capability by linking strategy to execution and by driving behaviors that help drive high performance. Key benefits include:

• Integration of corporate strategy, value drivers, metrics and performance reviews.

• Resources allocated to prioritized initiatives and critical-path activities.

• Management of the capital allocation process and the measurement of results.

• Easily accessible, integrated and accurate information.

• Flexible planning and forecasting processes that accommodate changes in the business.

• Support for better decision making.


High performance delivered: Accenture and a Retail FORTUNE 500 companyA retail FORTUNE 500 company sought to increase profitable growth ahead of competitors in an increasingly saturated market. Growth was costing more, and therefore a new customer- facing strategy was created to build longevity with existing customer relationships and focusing on essential customer metrics as lead indicators to financial results. An analysis of current operations revealed that the company’s legacy performance management capabilities—defined as a balanced set of metrics, analytics, reporting, incentives and enabling technologies—were not aligned with this new direction. In response, the company launched a transformational program to realign its performance management capabilities with the intended strategy so that critical behaviors and actions in the business could respond to the end-to-end needs of the customer.

The retail FORTUNE 500 company asked Accenture to partner with them during this transformational time. Accenture worked closely with their leadership to co-create a new performance management and analytic capability based on leading practices and specific organizational needs. This work included the development of a metrics-based approach to a customer-focused retail operation as well as a new analytics organization that was created to develop and implement actionable insights for corporate and field inquiries.

Accenture also worked with the company to enhance their data warehousing and information management capabilities. A single source of information was created based on the critical metrics. Robust trending and visualization functionalities were deployed to broaden the context for business performance discussions and make it easier for employees to put the information to use in service of the customer’s needs. New event-based alerts were designed to proactively inform leaders about required management interventions or opportunities. This work also included the creation of cross-functional data governance processes to address business and data impacts upstream from data warehouse operations and processes. Accenture helped the company develop a fully integrated data model to include customer information with financial, product and operational information.

Accenture’s leading position in enterprise performance management is helping this company elevate their high performance in several ways. A single set of enterprise metrics now assists corporate and field personnel to get on the same page when discussing performance issues and business opportunities in addition to speeding up the time from decision to action. A new analytic support model helps identify, organize and link information with action. Standard reporting and business intelligence tools, as well as standard operating platforms, help link metrics with the right performance management behaviors at scale. And, consistent with their core values, the company worked from a position of strength to re-invent how they manage performance, with a focus on measuring the essential components—customer relationships, employee engagement and operational excellence—critical to achieving profitable growth and maintaining their competitive edge.


Risk ManagementIn today’s challenging global economy, companies confront a variety of environment and process risks, as well as risks from incomplete or biased information for decision making. To stay on the path to high performance, companies must identify, assess, manage and monitor their business opportunities and risks in an integrated and transparent way.

Although risk management has been an existing function within the finance departments of some organizations for many years, recent Accenture research has shown that few companies have a standardized and fully integrated risk management capability that is common to all functions across the enterprise.

The Accenture Risk Management solution helps organizations transform their risk management function from a reactive and fragmented operation to one that is a strategic, tactical and operational instrument capable of enhancing and protecting shareholder value while fulfilling regulatory obligations.

Accenture helps organizations create an enterprise risk management capability that is (1) preventative—focused on controls and regulatory compliance issues that mitigate risks and protect against loss, (2) strategic and entrepreneurial—focused on aligning risk and reward in pursuit of business advantage and high performance, and (3) cost efficient—focused on controlling effectiveness in design and implementation of risk target operating models.

BenefitsThe Accenture Risk Management solution helps organizations realize better economic returns, improve shareholder value and increase stakeholder confidence by helping organizations in:

• Cost-efficiently fulfilling compliance requirements and improving risk management capabilities with impact on ratings and shareholder value, and implementing effective risk governance and operating models supported by an integrated risk and finance architecture.

• Proactively protecting shareholder value against the adverse impact of business disruption.

• Protecting and increasing economic value using risk-adjusted performance management methods and tools, and by applying economic steering principles.


High performance delivered: Accenture and Vale As one of the largest private-sector companies in Latin America, Vale is also the second-largest diversified metals and mining company in the world, with mineral exploration efforts in 19 countries. Through an aggressive program of mergers and acquisitions, Vale altered its revenue composition, multiplying its total debt fivefold within only three years. To safeguard its assets from risk, the company asked Accenture to help transform its risk profile through a comprehensive enterprise risk management initiative focused on three related initiatives: market risk management, credit risk management and operational risk management.

To mitigate market risk, the Vale and Accenture team focused on improving strategic planning and decision-making processes through scenario generation and cash flow project analysis. Vale’s finance organization also improved its capability to manage the volatility of cash flow and its exposure to fluctuations in local currencies.

To improve credit risk management capabilities, the team unified the processes and methodologies for defining Vale’s and its bank’s credit limits. They also improved the company’s exposure control and measurement, giving it more control over company cash flow, centralizing credit limit definition, and decentralizing control and measurement.

To mitigate operational risk, Accenture helped Vale more effectively align business strategy with operations, provided for a centralized allocation of capital to cover expected losses and defined a corporate insurance policy.

Through this enterprise risk management program, Accenture is helping Vale increase shareholder value and advance toward high performance in several ways, including:

• Improving capital allocation.

• Increasing operating performance.

• Creating stronger compliance and prevention capabilities.

• Enhancing corporate reputation.

The Accenture Risk Management solution helps organizations realize better economic returns, improve shareholder value and increase stakeholder confidence.


Accenture’s Finance & Performance Management practice maintains a dedicated core of thousands of deeply experienced resources in finance and accounting capabilities across 49 countries. We provide finance and accounting outsourcing services through our network of global delivery centers that leverage common assets, tools and people.

Accenture also manages a focused portfolio of strategic alliances—companies that range from established leaders to emerging innovators. This alliance approach enables us to enhance our offerings while remaining responsive to market changes.

Accenture is acknowledged by multiple industry analysts as a market leader in such areas as business intelligence, performance management services, systems integration and finance and accounting BPO.

Our finance and performance management practice is acknowledged as an industry thought leader. Our ongoing research program into high-performance finance explores the relationship between finance mastery and achieving high performance. The program is based on primary research, including CFO interviews, surveys and roundtables, as well as our experience from our work with clients. The result of this research has been a series of books and research reports that articulate Accenture’s unique point of view on finance mastery and achieving high performance.

We help clients drive toward high performance through comprehensive solutions backed by deep and comprehensive assets that have been tested in multiple client environments. These assets include:

• Toolkits and diagnostics for finance and accounting strategy, processes and workforce capabilities.

• Tax diagnostics and balanced scorecards.

• Enterprise performance management methods, diagnostics and industry metrics.

• Comprehensive methods and tools for shared services implementations.

• A risk management framework and a credit risk toolbox.

Accenture: A global leader in finance and performance management services


ContactFor more information on how Accenture’s distinctive resources and assets in finance and performance management can help your organization drive toward high performance, please contact: [email protected]

Copyright © 2009 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. 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. With more than 181,000 people serving clients in over 120 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$23.39 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2008. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

Finance & Performance Management Services · 2015-05-23 · Finance & Performance Management...

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