High-performance change enablement helps drive SAP at Accenture

Transcription

1 High-performance change enablement helps drive SAP at Accenture

2 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 approximately 373,000 employees with access to the information and capabilities to be a high-performance business. The company s single-instance SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is critical to the organization s drive for high performance. 2

3 OPPORTUNITY When Accenture transitioned from a private partnership to a global public company, it made the strategic decision to migrate to a single-instance global SAP platform for its internal business functions, including Finance, Human Resources, Denied Party Screenings (DPS), Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), Forecasting and others. Today, Accenture s ERP system is one of Accenture s key assets, integrating the majority of its internal business functions and users and powering the core functions of the organization. To achieve the full benefits of its ERP solution, Accenture introduced sweeping new user and application support processes and change enablement methodologies. These processes drive collaboration across the diverse internal business functions that use the ERP solution and ensure its ongoing stability, benefit realization and efficient operation. As part of this effort, Accenture created a change enablement program, including a communications, continuous learning and knowledge management capability, a comprehensive user support system, and a stakeholder management structure that would prove to be the key ongoing components for this leading-edge production support solution. Accenture keeps the capability current by leveraging social collaboration techniques, listening to and engaging on the feedback of users. aligning IT with business priorities enabling a digital Accenture driving down the cost of IT 3

4 SOLUTION We recognized from the start of the program that we had to establish a user support capability that would live on past go-live of the solution, to provide ongoing communication and training for users of the solution as it evolved and as users experience with the solution developed, says Todd Harding, Accenture Global Operational Programs Managing Director. Business benefits are often achieved well past go-live and must be sustained through active and ongoing change enablement, he adds. As a result, and under the guidance of Accenture s Change Enablement capability, Accenture s internal IT organization collaborated with the business to create a Change Enablement team that would sit within Accenture s Operations Support for the Enterprise (OSE) organization. Together, OSE teams deliver production and end-user support for Accenture s ERP operations. The objective of the Change Enablement team was to provide timely and reliable communications, ongoing training and SAP functional/business knowledge management and support for Accenture s SAP users around the world. With a digital focus, the Change Enablement team led Accenture s internal IT organization and business process teams in five main areas: Providing consistent communications across all ERP applications and business process areas to make users aware of system emergencies and functionality and enhancements in upcoming releases. Creating and maintaining appropriate and relevant ongoing training and reference materials on knowledge management sites, organized by business process and user. Organizing subject matter experts to respond to users questions, share best practices and advocate the global solution. Providing a smart, central user request and inquiry workflow tool. Assisting projects with smooth integration of new ERP capabilities into the standard Accenture ERP operating, governance and support models. Since laying the Change Enablement foundation more than a decade ago, the team has evolved and honed its capabilities into a streamlined operation that leverages a variety of communication vehicles to deliver ongoing learning and support in a digital way to more than 15,000 users across all ERP system applications at Accenture. Capabilities today are organized along four main areas: 4

5 ERP communications The Change Enablement team develops and issues communications to SAP and upstream/downstream application users, as well as maintains the overall release communication plan and program communications architecture. The architecture fully leverages a broad set of digital communication vehicles and social learning concepts including , ERP desktop/front-door, community of practice websites, and blogs with content driven and provided by ERP production support teams, business teams and super users. Communications fall into two categories: ad hoc/issue and operational. Ad hoc/issue communications are more time-sensitive communications, such as outage or incident communications. They are issued via and/or application desktop/front-door postings and alert users to impacts, actions being taken to address or actions required by the users. These communications are handled through 24-hour, follow-the-sun communication support, established by locating team members across four countries covering all time zones. As the ERP systems are an always-on capability, ERP communications follow suit. With 24/7 support from the Change Enablement team, Accenture SAP users located around the world are kept informed of system emergencies (e.g., unexpected downtimes, data discrepancies and performance degradation). The team leverages standard communication templates and protocols based on incident type. This quick response time helps to ensure that our SAP users can be notified promptly of what to do during an issue that may be occurring during a critical processing period no matter what time of day, says Ann Muehlebach, Accenture s Order-to-Cash Business Process Lead. Operational communications include scheduled communications, such as release announcements, leadership updates and tips and tricks newsletters. In addition, a critical set of operational communications is used to facilitate the highly integrated mid-month and month-end close processes that involve thousands of users across Accenture Finance and Human Resources. The Change Enablement team and business support teams prepare and maintain a key business activities calendar that is used as the basis for close process reminders to keep users informed about key activities and changes in the close cycle, report release schedule and important announcements related to the ERP system during the close. Global, virtual collaboration and social learning are key enablers in Accenture s digital environment. Capitalizing on this, the Change Enablement team added an online community of practice site as another vehicle to drive additional interaction and shared learning across the user community. The online community of practice site also allows the ERP production support teams and users to quickly disseminate valuable information and transfer best practices among each other. 5

6 Business procedures knowledge management sites and internal learning site The Change Enablement team also manages a suite of online knowledge sites, which house functional procedures, demonstrations, process flows, support documents, training content and standard templates. These provide both global and location-specific procedural documentation with additional links to support materials. New and experienced users alike benefit from a consistent repository of reference information that the Change Enablement team refreshes with the business support teams as system enhancements and changes to the ERP are made. The team also maintains the architecture on a centralized support site. In recent years, the team has enhanced the support site to integrate with Accenture s internal social learning capabilities and to enable mobile device compatibility. Accenture s company-wide internal learning site houses a wide variety of ERP-at-Accenture training materials organized by ERP process area. This approach to training helps users become self-enabled. The Change Enablement team serves as the central learning and knowledge management coordinator for Accenture s ERP applications. The team maintains the ERP-at-Accenture training curriculum and course materials, course requirements, course design, training content approach and development. In addition, the team maintains an SAP Training Environment so that new joiners can easily and realistically practice with SAP processes and procedures. They also work with initiative teams on how to properly integrate new content into the ERP knowledge and support site structure (e.g., process model alignment, proper sign-offs, etc.). Inquiry and request workflow tool A sophisticated inquiry and request workflow tool helps users submit questions and/or requests to update business/master data or make enhancements to the solution or reports. The tool routes these to the appropriate lead/super user network or the business teams for response and resolution and allows the user to track status of resolution. Users issues and questions are usually addressed within 24 hours or escalated for handling according to established service level agreements (SLAs) based on criticality and complexity. The tool along with the community of practice website is also used as a source for frequently asked questions (FAQs) and tips and tricks to help users benefit from responses to common questions. Service introduction As Accenture is continually enabling new capabilities with its ERP, the Change Enablement team helps the initiative teams that are responsible for bringing these new capabilities online to assess the requirements for successful support and sustainment of the capability post go-live, according to standard Accenture ERP operating, governance and support models. They then support the initiatives as they establish them as a part of their service introduction plans. For example, Change Enablement worked with Accenture s Treasury, Integrated Forecasting, and Engagement Management tool teams to ensure that as soon as new users logged on to these capabilities for the first time, the business procedures, tools and teams were in place to support these new users. 6

7 RESULTS Through a more than decade-long journey of effective delivery of communications, learning, support and service introduction capabilities, Accenture s Change Enablement team has become an essential element in running a single global instance of SAP at Accenture. The Change Enablement team collaborates closely with Accenture s technology organization and all business process teams to ensure that users of Accenture s ERP systems have the tools and the information they need to perform their jobs with the ERP. Specifically, the Change Enablement activities have enabled and continue to promote: Increased efficiency and speed to value realization: The activities of the Change Enablement team have helped to ensure that through two major and two minor releases per year including deployment of extensive new capabilities and enhancements, a stable state is reached five weeks post release on average. Initiatives have been able to quickly and seamlessly transition into the end-state support model more quickly, users have embraced and understood the new capabilities more completely and, as such, initiative benefits have been realized sooner and sustained, and without disruption to running the day-to-day business. Reduced risk through communication timeliness and consistency: In emergency situations, ERP users receive a communication within 30 minutes of the time an issue arises, giving them ample time to re-plan key business activities that may impact analysis and reporting. Communications are written and structured using standard templates, enabling quicker response time. In addition, ERP users leverage smart inquiry routing tools to get urgent questions answered quickly by process experts. Reduced cost and increased efficiency through selfsupport and social learning: Each year, more than 12,000 people log into the Change Enablementmanaged support sites that house ERP procedures and functional support for ERP-related tools. Each month over 30 users are sharing tips and tricks with other users via the online community of practice site. Access to this material translates into fewer calls to the tier 1 and tier 2 support teams. The size of the Change Enablement team has remained steady since the first release of SAP, while the base of SAP users has grown by 270 percent. Increased collaboration through more effective use of social learning: Followers of the online community of practice site have embraced the opportunity to interact real time with one another and with experts. The community fosters teaming and open-sourced learning that balance well with other communication vehicles used by the Change Enablement team. In 2015, ERP customers reported 100 percent satisfaction with the communications services the Change Enablement team provided. Active and ongoing change management through communications, continuous learning, knowledge management and user support have proved to be essential to an efficient ERP program at Accenture, ensuring that initiatives, teams and users stay connected and remain informed and capable. Equally important, the Change Enablement capability has demonstrated value to the business through its vital role in supporting global and streamlined ERP operations. 7

8 About Accenture Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions underpinned by the world s largest delivery network Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 373,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at Copyright 2016 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture