Accenture launches SynOps to help enterprises achieve competitive advantage

Accenture has launched SynOps, an operating “engine” that optimizes the synergy of data, applied intelligence, digital technologies and talent to help organizations transform business operations, create user experiences and deliver results.

SynOps is an assembly of talent, capabilities and technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, that gives organizations a roadmap for achieving higher levels of efficiencies across the enterprise. SynOps enables companies to make their organizations more flexible, agile and responsive, helping them generate additional value by driving growth and scaling operations.

SynOps harnesses data and insights from more than 1,000 Accenture client engagements and hundreds of years of cumulative expertise across business functions, industries and domains. By synthesizing this with data from clients’ existing systems and drawing on external data to provide benchmarks, SynOps identifies opportunities for business process reinvention. The result, in addition to a higher return investment from existing IT systems, is insights — enabling better decisions and business outcomes.

Combining the assembly of talent and human-machine work orchestration with analytics, SynOps enables organizations to reinvent business processes and achieve intelligent operations across key functions such as finance & accounting, marketing and procurement.

SynOps comprises four essential components:

• Human + machine talent: SynOps draws on Accenture’s more than 100,000 Operations professionals — including data scientists and AI experts — to complement and augment the company’s machine workforce of more than 3,600 automation solutions, 65 analytics apps and 40 AI advisors.
• Work orchestration: SynOps orchestrates the allocation of work, assigning transactional tasks to software bots and leveraging AI and analytics to identify new opportunities for automation. Through data-based insights, SynOps also ensures that the right resource is tapped for the right task.
• Insights and intelligence: SynOps integrates the analytics and AI capabilities of the Accenture Insights Platform and partner technologies with more than 100 preconfigured analytics and AI solutions to deliver insights that enable business outcomes and competitive advantage.
• Diverse data: SynOps enables the collection, monitoring, storage, analysis and reporting of structured and unstructured data from diverse sources and creates the environment for data exploration and AI model development to enhance real-time decision-making.

Examples of recent SynOps investments by Accenture clients and results include:

A global IT company deployed SynOps for Finance to drive operational excellence. With high administrative costs and falling customer satisfaction, the company needed to better see and manage its financial performance while freeing up cash to take advantage of market opportunities and to grow.

Process transformation, automation and analytics boosted productivity by more than 50 percent. With the productivity gains, automated processes and a new customer portal, more than $140 million in savings were delivered.

A high-tech company encountered fragmented sales pipeline data without a single source of truth. Through SynOps for Marketing, applied advanced analytics helped augment, treat and rank leads — helping the client process 740,000 leads (compared with the 25,000 leads previously processed in one year) and leading to an 11 times increase in revenue in the first four months.

A multi-national food and beverage company leveraged SynOps for Procurement when profitability was harder to achieve despite higher revenues. SynOps provided talent with digital tools, information and process rigor and gave users end-to-end transaction transparency. The engine also gave leaders global spend visibility to make better decisions. From an improved user experience to greater efficiency and productivity, SynOps helped the company save millions of dollars in indirect procurement costs. SynOps’ intelligent model ultimately delivered US $30 million in savings, equivalent to an average of 15 percent savings per year.

“SynOps represents the re-imagining of the enterprise as operations leaders grapple with integrating their automation, analytics and AI strategies,” said Phil Fersht, CEO and chief analyst at HFS Research. “Moreover, Accenture focuses SynOps on augmenting the human experts, which is so critical as companies design the processes they need to drive an effective operations strategy and business outcomes.”

Nirav Sampat, group technology officer of Accenture Operations, said, “SynOps’ greatest value is in how it creates compound intelligence from emerging technologies powered by human expertise to deliver better insights, which lead to better-informed decisions, stronger outcomes — and results previously unimaginable.”

Debbie Polishook, group chief executive of Accenture Operations, said, “For our clients, the key to delivering exceptional business impact — for speed to realized value, flexibility and sustainable competitive advantage — is intelligent operations. SynOps will play an integral role in helping our clients in their journey to intelligent operations. SynOps ultimately showcases the art of the possible with how clients can now embrace innovation to drive new value — it is ‘the new’ applied now.”