The keynote by Dr. Jost was followed by a keynote of Mr. Riemensperger from Accenture. He has been with the company more than 20 years. During that time, Accenture grew from less than 10,000 employees up to almost 200,000 people today. This is quite an achievement and he sees business process management as core driver of this success.
In the past years, he noticed the following global trends:
- new customers, for example in India or China
- innovation
- talent
- energy & resources
- capital
He had an interesting example. While consulting to large international companies, they usually start by investigating core processes like product development, supply chain management and customer relationship management. This often already reveals major redundancies, but it is only the beginning. In a next step, the analysis is done to other divisions revealing many more redundancies like multiple warehouse systems. But still, this analysis can be extended by including different countries in the analysis making the overall results even worse. According to Mr. Riemensperger you end up with something which is very redundant and complex.
He gave life to this problem by giving concrete examples of customers they are working with currently. He showed how they solved those problems by taking the global trends he mentioned before into account. For example, in order to come up with global solutions, they put together teams from around the world to make use of talents available, but also to ensure that the solutions designed do not just work in a single country.
Mr. Riemensperger closed his talk by saying that the race for cost reductions is over. Soon, companies will focus on automation of their processes. Here, Accenture already invested in the last 5 years by documenting their business process management knowledge in ARIS. They are also working on technology to generate software based on this knowledge for customers.