International
PwC’s partnership with ABB enabled a seamless global finance transformation within 24 months, utilising SAP RISE, and successfully coordinated across 87 countries, leveraging cultural sensitivity and multilingual expertise.
ABB is an international leader in electrification and automation, worth $30 billion and with operations in 87 countries. Despite the company’s huge size, its future success was hindered by fragmented data and systems, which made financial reporting slow and opaque, and reduced confidence in its decision-making ability. Although its strategic vision, ‘The ABB Way’, aimed to decentralise the company’s operations and accountability, its Finance function was pivotal, so such moves could happen only if its financial data and systems were robust and coherent.
PwC partnered with ABB to support an ambitious transformation of its entire global finance operation. The programme would establish a single source of truth that enabled simpler, real-time reporting, make costs more visible across the whole supply chain, and equip ABB with a clearer, simpler information architecture that would support the company’s decentralisation strategy.
At the heart of the transformation lay a Financial Unified Data Model, which used SAP Master Data Governance to achieve consistent and reliable data across the client’s entire global operation. Financial record-keeping was provided by SAP Central Finance, while associated products supported data warehousing and analytics, to deliver real-time, transparent financial and management reporting across the whole business.
The big challenge would be how to transition to this target system from the client’s fragmented, global collection of legacy systems and data. PwC chose to deploy SAP RISE, a product specifically designed to help businesses transition to a modern, cloud-based ERP system. Using RISE at this scale was unprecedented, but the programme team’s approach, planning and management helped it deliver 200 go-lives across 87 countries and 6 time zones in just 24 months, making the programme an astonishing achievement in the face of global scale and complexity.
With so much at stake, it was essential that programme ownership was genuinely shared between both partners. Programme governance therefore adopted a ‘two-in-a-box’ model, in which each key leadership role was shared between ABB and PwC, to ensure that every significant decision was made from a joint perspective.
ABB’s global scale brought not only technical complexity, but also the cultural and communication challenges of working across many so countries. PwC’s team therefore included more than 200 specialists from 7 countries, who collaborated seamlessly with client teams around the world. In particular, the firm’s diverse and multilingual team could work with the client in 32 languages, while its breadth of cultural awareness enabled project planning to be meticulous, and incorporate regional festivals such as Diwali, Eid and Christmas. This huge and rapid global transformation was possible only because the programme approach embraced the diversity of working dynamics across the client’s many lands and cultures.
ABB now has greater visibility of its costs, enabling it to realise significant financial benefits. It also has the reliable, real-time insights it needs to make effective decisions, and a robust data infrastructure that will support future progress along The ABB Way. Furthermore, PwC’s innovative, ground-breaking approach has created a blueprint that can be applied in future ABB programmes and similar huge transformations internationally.
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