CASE STUDY Accenture
Journey to SAP S/4HANA
Building a strong, scalable foundation for future-ready operations
3-MINUTE READ
Accenture, powered by an SAP digital core and composable cloud architecture, was a first mover to SAP S/4HANA to drive its finance transformation.
Historically, Accenture ran its core financial processing on a single global instance of SAP Business Suite on Microsoft SQL in an on-premise data center. As the company has grown, it needs to operate with more insight, agility, efficiency, and compliance across multiple, diverse business units. This means that business processes and IT capabilities must contend with a faster pace of change and growth—all driving the need to evolve Accenture’s ERP to be ready for the future.
Accenture saw the migration to SAP S/4 HANA as a key step on its digital roadmap—an opportunity to deliver value to the business and create a strong foundation for long-term performance and new capabilities. For these reasons, Accenture undertook a multi-phased program to implement SAP S/4HANA as a brownfield conversion at scale. Accenture has since migrated to RISE with SAP and follows a "stay current to stay ahead" approach, ensuring compliance and easy access to innovation through regular upgrades.
A multi-phase pathway to change
A program team with Accenture’s internal IT and Finance professionals teamed with Accenture’s SAP Business Group and SAP to lay the foundation for future business needs while minimizing impact to the business.
Migrating from running SAP ECC 6.0 on Microsoft SQL Server to SAP Business Suite on HANA set the foundation for the transformation of Accenture’s technology architecture and IT capabilities.
The second phase established the transformational technology foundation with the implementation of SAP S/4HANA 1610. For the implementation approach to SAP S/4HANA, Accenture chose to migrate considering its highly optimized existing platform and standardized business processes.
The upgrade to version 1610 involved enabling Accenture’s economic model on SAP S/4HANA and aligning Accenture’s design with SAP S/4HANA enhanced capabilities. Agile delivery was scoped into three sprints, and the team performed multiple technical and four production-like mock conversions; conducted extensive automated testing; developed training; and supported business readiness with an integrated change and communication plan across the impacted functions and systems; and finally developed service introduction for the cutover, stabilization, and steady-state operations.
Stay current to stay ahead
Accenture’s SAP strategy is to stay current with upgrades. This is pivotal to:
Building on the success and stability of the previous SAP BW on SAP HANA move to Microsoft Azure, Accenture leadership had the confidence to move the company’s most business-critical platform, SAP S/4HANA, to the Microsoft Azure cloud. With this move, Accenture became among the first enterprises to run its production SAP S/4HANA® system on Microsoft Azure's next-generation virtualized architecture at scale.
To continue to consume, not own, Accenture has been a first mover to RISE with SAP. This move gives Accenture's global IT teams access to a platform that stays current and a dynamic ecosystem of evolving services. They can now select and test various services, adopting those that best meet Accenture's business needs. The platform has changed how Accenture engages with technology in that it is more dynamic and offers ongoing opportunities to select new services to enhance how IT teams meet the needs of the business. Business teams, in turn, receive new solutions that improve the way they work, often gaining better insights for business decisions.