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In recent years, it has become more difficult in the global market to bring the right engineering capabilities to the right place to solve such problems as cost reductions, an aging workforce, improving time to market, and help improving efficiency and productivity, all while trying to keep the information confidential.

Knowing that these needs exist, Accenture Aerospace & Defense Engineering Services conducted a study in early 2010 to see what the interests were of leading decision makers. Their study was based on answers from executives in the aerospace and defense industries, of which 88% of the respondents’ have annual revenue greater than $500 million.

The research also uncovered the main barriers A&D companies face in sourcing engineering services. The top three answers were confidentiality (97%), impact on quality (94%), and flexibility for fluctuating demand (81%).

A perfect example of this service trend can be seen in the agreement made between Accenture and Finmeccanica. Finmeccanica, headquartered in Rome, Italy, has a large industrial base in the United Kingdom with production facilities in Europe and the United States. Finmeccanica has a workforce of more than 73,000 people and annual revenues of more than $21 billion. To help maintain its leadership position, the group spends 20% of its revenue from its core businesses on research and development, and maintains laboratories staffed with approximately 3,000 highly specialized researchers.

Accenture worked with Finmeccanica to fundamentally re-invent how it does business around the world by transitioning to a faster, more centralized, and easier-to-leverage enterprise performance management (EPM) information process model.

To help with the development of the model for Finmeccanica, the company and Accenture began reviewing and redesigning their reporting processes. This effort included defining a financial data governance model that would work across the company’s varied operating companies to bring greater consistency and a common language to group-wide reporting. The model also spawned the creation of a road map depicting how Finmeccanica could move forward to implement its new approach.

With the new EPM processes, Finmeccanica quickly saw improved data integrity and consistency, thanks to the groupwide data-governance model and the automatic collection of data. Data management has been streamlined, allowing the company to focus on analyzing data rather than on the setup and preparation of reports.

With the new model defined, Accenture implemented the Oracle Hyperion performance management software to support Finmeccanica’s new process. For this effort, Accenture drew on its close working relationship with Oracle, which provided Hyperion systems expertise to support Accenture’s business knowledge and systems-integration and change management capabilities.

With the help of Accenture, clients in the A&D industries can lessen the risk of vulnerabilities, enhance reactive capabilities, and become proactive by using situational awareness and cyber intelligence to sense challenges within the enterprise, and achieve growth through innovation and accelerate towards high performance.

Accenture
New York, NY
accenture.com