Part of the Global Service Centre Organisation - Globally Connected, Easily Accessible Customer Service.

Accenture faces many of the same challenges as its clients. As a result, Accenture continually examines its own practices and has a cyclical programme of analysis and re-engineering. This ensures that our internal business processes are always aligned with our global vision and the needs of our clients.

Until 1999, the Accenture office in each European country operated its own administrative service centre, looking after essential back-office functions such as accounting, time and expenses recording and IT helpdesk. These centres operated according to local standards, with the result that service levels were uneven and processes were not standardised.

Towards the end of 1999, Accenture established the European Service Centre (ESC) in Dublin. The vision for the ESC is to provide a world-class service to the business by unifying and re-engineering repetitive processes and continuously improving them. Accenture offices in each country are relieved of the management overhead and effort associated with a range of financial processing, IT development and support, human resource administration, procurement, marketing & communications, alliances and facilities.

Employees in Dublin deliver high-quality standardised services to the 15 European and Middle Eastern offices with greatly improved efficiency. Since setting up the centre, the cost per transaction has been reduced by over 50 percent, and the company has achieved savings of over €40 million on procurement costs alone. The billing process has been streamlined and the number of overdue invoices reduced by 27 percent.

The ESC is part of our Global Service Centre Organisation (GSCO) which helps to support 112,000 employees, customers and vendors across 170 Accenture entities. The GSCO drives standard methodologies, tools and architecture and reduces costs by redistributing work to the most cost-effective locations.

Accenture ESC Director Julie Spillane notes: “The European Service Centre - along with our network of Global Service Centres - allows us to quickly adapt to the changing requirements of our business and our clients; this would not be possible in a distributed environment.”

This networked hub approach:

• Delivers continued cost savings
• Provides better career paths for our people
• Drives high value roles being established in centres of excellence
• Allows end-to-end processing of business functions in one location to maximise SAP investment and enhance controls
• Centralised information in one location enables service centres to serve as business advisors
• Gives every region service options for flexibility and “disaster recovery” risk mitigation
• Multiple established locations attract new service centre work and support rapid growth.

The ESC also acts as a showcase environment so that client companies can see the realities of outsourcing implementation for themselves. The custom-built centre uses leading-edge technologies to support an operation which is configured to world-class standards. It illustrates in a very practical way Accenture's thought leadership and dynamic approach in the area of shared services.

The real-world experience gained internally has been used to help many clients develop a suitable platform to support their continued growth, increase efficiency, improve service levels, achieve economies of scale and increase profits.

Hugh McCallum,
Interim Director, European Service Centre.