Accenture Benchmarking Solutions From Insight to Action

Accenture Benchmarking
Solutions: From insight
to action
Working in close collaboration with a
client’s finance leadership, Accenture’s
skilled professionals use the unique
assets of Accenture Benchmarking
Solutions to deliver a comprehensive
benchmarking assessment of the
finance function. We then help a
company translate insights from
the benchmarking analysis into an
actionable set of initiatives, supported
by a rigorous business case that can
address shortcomings identified through
the benchmarking process. With a
sound set of comparative numbers and
an analysis of the implications of those
numbers, Accenture helps companies
use the benchmarking process to drive
high performance. The net result is
efficient and effective use of scarce
finance function resources.
Accenture’s benchmarking process
involves several phases that help
companies discover, deliver and
maintain the value from an analysis
of their finance function performance.
Collecting data
Working with personnel from your
finance function, we begin by
gathering relevant data related to
costs, headcount, cycle time and
performance. We are guided in this
effort by the Accenture Finance Process
Excellence Framework. The framework
looks across all major processes of
the finance function, allows drilldown
into the sub-processes and
activities that make up each process,
and provides a common structure to
help ensure consistent comparisons
across companies and internally across
different businesses or locations.
(See Figure 2.)
We supplement the data gathered in
this phase with targeted executive
interviews that enable us to put the
numbers into the proper context
for analysis. This phase of the
3
benchmarking process establishes
a formal baseline that helps make
comparisons and also enables the
measurement of progress when a
transformation program is eventually
put in place.
This first phase of work typically
generates insights—even before the
formal benchmarking comparison—that
are valuable to an executive team. For
example, we worked with a company
looking to reduce selling, general and
administrative (SG&A) costs following
a major acquisition. In the data
collection phase of benchmarking,
the company gained a greater
understanding of the redundancies
that existed in its various finance
organizations around the world. That
understanding was key to eventually
delivering cost savings from its finance
transformation program.
Performing the
benchmarking comparison
In the next phase of work, we perform
an external benchmarking comparison
for the finance function in total as well
as for individual finance processes. The
assessment gives company executives
a powerful snapshot look at how the
finance function compares with peers,
providing a quartile ranking of finance
cost and performance metrics across all
finance processes. This analysis allows
us to identify processes not being
performed at competitive levels of cost
or service relative to peers.
In addition to the quantitative analysis
we perform a qualitative assessment.
This evaluation looks at the extent
to which externally validated leading
practices have been adopted. It also
helps identify root causes and drivers
underlying the current performance of
the finance function.
Accenture’s approach during this
phase of work is to identify leading
practices not only within a specific
industry but across all industries. This
is important because companies can
learn from others outside their industry
as well as from within. For example,
banks have completely transformed
their “products” based on insights
from consumer products companies.
Retail companies compete in an
extremely tight margin environment
and therefore offer lessons for other
industries where cost reduction is
critical to success. And many energy
companies have established truly global
operating models that can be adopted
by companies in other industries. If
a company only compares itself to
like companies, they may miss out
on opportunities to adopt innovative
practices that can give them a
competitive advantage in their industry.
We also benchmark costs and leading
practices internally by comparing
geographies and business units to one
another. This helps to identify internal
cost and performance leaders so that
their experiences and approaches can
be identified for possible adoption by
other parts of the organization.
A benchmarking analysis permits
executives to cast an objective light
on their finance function, and on the
presumptions by which it operates. For
example, during a recent benchmarking
study, executives found that what they
had always referred to as “low-cost
transaction processing” was, in fact,
not low-cost at all. This finding enabled
them to put in place more aggressive
plans to bring costs into line with
companies identified as top performers
and bring focus to an area that was
previously not on its management’s radar.