“Mercury allowed us to further differentiate our group from our competitors. Mercury IT Governance Center allows us to build our processes into a powerful application that automates their repeatability, sweeping away those three-ring binders full of paper processes that used to gather dust on our clients’ shelves. Our clients like this because it gives them visibility into what’s going on. It also reinforces our commitment to professionalism with our clients.”

– David Ehninger, Associate Partner, Accenture Delivery Center Houston

Accenture is among the world’s leading management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing companies. When companies hire Accenture, they expect excellence - but Accenture knows that today’s “excellent” can be tomorrow’s “mediocre” – unless the organization keeps finding new, better ways to deliver value to its customers.

IT outsourcing is an important, growing part of Accenture’s business. Because it’s a business, Accenture recognizes it can’t exceed customer expectations or make a profit with a “cost-center” mentality. When companies outsource IT, they expect to see improved methodologies, processes, and discipline put into place. They want their IT to work better, and in most cases, they want it to be cheaper.

“Success in this business is all about building and enforcing repeatable processes,” explained David Ehninger, associate partner of Accenture Delivery Center Houston, which serves clients in energy and other industries. Accenture considered many options in its search to improve service delivery through effective process design, enforcement, and automation.

Accenture Discovers Mercury
While surveying software being used by Accenture’s accounts, Ehninger learned about Mercury’s business technology optimization (BTO) offering for IT Governance - Mercury IT Governance Center™. This Optimization Center provides the first integrated transaction system for IT - real-time IT governance to turn the dials and make decisions. Specifically, Accenture purchased Mercury IT Governance Dashboard, Mercury Change Management Extension™ for SAP®, and Mercury Time Management. Accenture Delivery Center Houston began implementing these products in July 2001.

A key outsourcing success factor for Accenture, both in terms of cost and customer satisfaction, is the transition process. “We spend a lot of time and money to develop good processes, so my objective was not to do it over and over for each customer, but to have this pre-built to shorten the transition time,” Ehninger said.

Six Months to Six Weeks
With Mercury IT Governance Center, Accenture has dramatically reduced the time and effort required to set up a new client. Without Mercury, this critical task could take three to six months with one full-time equivalent (FTE) person. Now Accenture is able to set up a new client in an average of six weeks with one and one-third FTEs. That means Accenture can set up a new client 54 to 77 percent faster. In addition, the setup requires only 320 hours of labor instead of the previous 520 to 1,040 hours, a labor cost savings of between 38 and 69 percent.

Mercury’s Approach Flexible Yet Rigorous
Mercury IT Governance Center is especially attractive to Accenture because of its flexibility. It can be quickly adapted to meet the demands of individual customers. Ehninger said that when it comes to process, customers are concerned about either the front end or the back end, not everything in the middle. “There’s often something they want to change about the initiation of a request, or about user acceptance, but they don’t really care how it moves through your factory in-between. Mercury IT Governance Center is so easy to configure that it lets us meet these specific customer needs, while keeping processes standardized from customer to customer.”

Accenture’s initial implementation of Mercury Change Management Extension for SAP tackled the management of maintenance and design/build of SAP for multiple customers. In an installation for a multinational energy company, first-time accuracy on work requests involving SAP transports increased in just six months from 92 percent to 99 percent-plus. This near-perfect performance all but eliminated rework and freed valuable IT resources to work on high-value projects.

Another way Mercury has delivered significant value to Accenture is by automating data gathering for reports. Ehninger estimated that what Mercury does for him automatically would require the equivalent of at least three full-time people to manually gather data, update spreadsheets, hold meetings to consolidate and reconcile inputs, and format and build reports.

Ehninger said Mercury gives him more confidence that the numbers are accurate. The old spreadsheet methods he used in the past were significantly less reliable.

Global Reach
Accenture’s business has long been global, but to deliver top value to customers in this competitive environment, more development is shifting to a low-cost, high-quality team in India. Mercury makes this work seamlessly for Accenture. “The collaboration and communication features in Mercury IT Governance Center provide us integrated, reliable processes, even when our teams are half a world apart,” Ehninger concluded. “The more we grow this part of our business, the more important this global integration capability becomes to us.”

For more details on this story, including a video testimonial, please visit: http://www.mercury.com/us/customers/directory/index/accenture.html