Turning process friction into flow

Accenture’s Procurement function is transforming to deliver value above and beyond what is expected of traditional procurement. We’ve shifted our focus past the traditional role of managing transactional compliance to also becoming a partner to our business functions, enabling Accenture’s bottom line. It’s the reason we changed our name to Procurement Plus several years ago.

Our systems landscape is SAP® Ariba® On Demand and a single global instance of SAP S/4HANA®. Our journey involves standardizing, simplifying and automating the elements of traditional procurement by digitizing processes, moving to a frictionless buying experience and developing analytics to enable intelligent procurement supported by data-driven decisions.

In working toward these goals for our mature and digitized procure-to-pay (P2P) process, our Procurement Plus team realized that despite running single global system instances, workflow variances existed between regions, categories and spend levels across processes.

Attempting to understand those variances was difficult—not knowing where to look, how, why, and what was different. Conversations with teams that influenced the differences often became subjective and emotional. Driving change this way was time consuming and problematic, so we looked for a better approach.

Advancing our transformation
Two years into our journey, our Procurement Plus team is taking advantage of the newest features of Celonis—the Execution Management System (EMS) combined with process mining, data analytics, task mining, execution application, action flows, automation and machine learning capabilities.

We’re developing new ways of working to allocate, prioritize and automate the execution of work for our delivery teams. The execution applications that drive workflow are helping us to digitize and measure previously offline processes, ensure the prioritization of critical items, and standardize communication with suppliers and internal stakeholders. The execution applications are also helping drive delivery efficiency while providing insights on processes that highlight systemic issues, such as a lack of training or insufficient communication to end users.

These uses of the execution applications allow our teams to make a step change in the way they execute the P2P processes. The way we make use of Celonis capabilities truly demonstrates the power of technology and human ingenuity. The EMS capability is deployed across many processes including invoice processing, duplicate invoice detection, invoice approval and assisted buying.

Some examples of achievements include:

• We deployed the combined execution application and action flows capability to complement our existing technology and automate the necessary validations our buying agents conduct. Outcomes include a 95 percent reduction of actionable transactions for the team, FTE savings of 90 percent and a further 10 percent reduction in cycle time.
• We digitized a previously non-standard process by combining automated, smart notifications and an execution application. The latter guides the Accounts Payable agents through user engagement and escalation using messaging, direct calls and emails with predefined, customized communication templates. As a result, in the pilot countries within four months of using the execution app, invoices approved by the due date increased by 23 percent. This combination of Celonis capabilities further complements our cloud solutions to drive efficiency for delivery, propelling Accenture’s Procurement to the next level of the transformation journey.