As Accenture’s business grows, organically and inorganically, we change how we run our enterprise. We applied technology and human ingenuity to evolve our SAP® enterprise system to tailor the right support for different demands, address a faster pace of change and operate with more insight, agility, efficiency and compliance.
Accenture runs its business on a single global SAP instance, using it for core business functions, including Finance, Forecasting, and Governance, Risk and Compliance. Our global IT organization put in place a multi-phased strategic road map to evolve our ERP to be ready for the future. A strong relationship and close collaboration with Microsoft and SAP helped us innovate to achieve our strategic goals.
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. Our goal was to migrate that instance to SAP S/4HANA to support business process flexibility and to run in the cloud.
The migration took place in four main phases: 1) moving to SAP HANA, 2) migrating SAP BW to SAP HANA, 3) implementing SAP S/4HANA, and 4) moving SAP S/4HANA to Microsoft Azure. For this fourth stage, Accenture collaborated with Microsoft at every step to develop an enterprise-ready operations architecture to support the SAP S/4HANA system, enabling a successful move to the cloud.
The scalability of the cloud allowed Accenture to double its production size seamlessly with no impact to the business, while lowering costs. Today, all of Accenture’s SAP applications are on the latest versions, driven by the latest database technology and the latest cloud-hosted offerings. And, by staying current, Accenture is well positioned to respond to growth and business changes.
