Alcon, Bosch, Citibank, Mondelēz, Reckitt,
Vodafone, and Wipro Recognized as Companies on the Cutting Edge of
Digital Transformation
The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: HCKT) today announced the
winners of its 2021 Digital Awards, which spotlight companies that
are on the cutting edge of using digital transformation solutions,
including automation, advanced analytics, and AI to hyper-automate
end-to-end business operations. This year’s winners are: Alcon for
Plan-to-Results (Data Analytics); Bosch for Purchase-to-Pay;
Citibank for Account-to-Report; Mondelēz International for
Order-to-Cash; Reckitt for IT Opportunity-to-Deployment; Vodafone
Procurement Company for Source-to-Purchase; and Wipro Limited for
Hire-to-Retire.
Four other companies were recognized as finalists in the 2021
competition: Johnson & Johnson; Philips; Takeda
Pharmaceuticals; and Wm Morrison Supermarkets plc
“It’s exceptionally interesting to see how companies are
maturing in their use of digital technologies,” said Paul Morrison,
Principal and Global Lead of Smart Automation at The Hackett Group.
“This year’s winners and finalists are much more ambitious than
what we’ve seen previously. Many are taking a hyper-automation
approach to end-to-end operational processes, with a strong
emphasis on process optimization and driving quantifiable
improvements for customers and other stakeholders. These companies
are looking to do more than simply reengineer. They’re reimagining
and systematically transforming how they work in finance,
procurement, HR and IT.”
“From a technology perspective, we’re also seeing companies
being more ambitious this year about the building blocks they use.
They are getting better at integrating a wider range of
technologies to drive greater levels of benefits,” said Morrison.
“This is the first year a majority of the winners integrated
automation, analytics, and machine learning, and the first year
we’ve seen a winner using Blockchain.”
According to Vin Kumar, Managing Partner and Digital Operations
Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group, “Overall, three
strong themes this year have been comprehensive automation of
end-to-end processes, acceleration of digital transformation, and a
greater focus on business enablement. The global pandemic has
pushed companies to move much more quickly in terms of digital
transformation, and it has underscored the value of becoming
leaner, smarter, and more agile. There’s a much sharper focus on
the requirements of the function being transformed. It’s not just
speculative ‘build it, and they will come’ development.”
Alcon – Winner, Plan-to-Results (Data Analytics) –
ForeSight
To support its journey in becoming an independent, standalone
publicly traded company, Alcon, the global leader in eye care
dedicated to helping people see brilliantly, built and implemented
ForeSight, a world-class, leading edge enterprise data, analytics,
data science and machine learning platform.
The primary project goals were to create a scalable and secure
enterprise data lake, analytics tools, embedded master data
management and data cataloging, visualization and reporting tools,
as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The project faced significant challenges. Alcon’s separation
from its former parent company provided a fixed deadline and a
rapid implementation schedule. At the outset, Alcon did not have
its own IT organization or data platform. The project required a
shift from on-premise systems to a 100% cloud platform while
reducing operational cost and, at the same time, enabling greater
capabilities and scalability.
The ForeSight implementation was enterprise-wide, encompassing
commercial sales force effectiveness, financial transformation,
machine learning-based financial forecasting, advanced human
resource analytics, manufacturing production line analysis and
manufacturing line operational reporting.
The project was exceptionally successful, moving Alcon from a
follower in data analytics technology and ability to that of a
leader. The separation of the analytics capability was completed
ahead of schedule, with the enterprise solution deployed in two
months − and at a significantly lower cost than comparable data
lake platform
Bosch – Winner, Purchase-to-Pay – Procure-to-Order Automation
Including Guided Procurement
The Bosch Group, a leading global supplier of technology and
services, standardized and digitized its end-to-end procure-to-pay
services to offer a seamless, highly-automated procurement
experience for indirect material and services with world-class
usability. One of the key features is user guidance integrated into
the central user platform which imperceptibly navigates the user to
the right buying channel. The system integrates more than 50 ERP
systems and standardizes processes for more than 300 company codes.
The core system in Bosch’s Global Business Services unit includes
seamless integration of advanced automation, including machine
learning, chatbot, AI, RPA, and more.
On its path to becoming a leading provider of IoT and mobility
solutions, Bosch is further expanding its digital supply chains. An
important building block of the company is the implementation of
seamless and digitized end-to-end processes. The former
procure-to-pay system was difficult for end-users to navigate due
to many different IT and process solutions. High levels of manual
work were required for activities such as PO creation, master data
management, and support.
Staff have been able to dedicate significantly more time to
negotiation support and other value-added tasks to support the
operational business units. The new procure-to-pay system paid for
itself in a few years. Benchmarks performed by The Hackett Group
show that Bosch now has world-class or better results across many
key procurement metrics, including order lines per FTE, no touch
order lines, and e-catalogue usage.
Citibank – Winner, Account-to-Report – Finance and Risk
Shared Services Digital Transformation Journey
To continue to improve the financial reporting processes,
Citibank’s Finance and Risk Shared Services (FRSS) applied
automation to 100+ operational processes in Finance to reduce
manual processes which support financial reporting.
FRSS introduced a plan to identify the sources of manual work
and ensure that processes were re-engineered before being
automated. They also identified appropriate digital tools to
address process pain points and remediate manual workarounds. Over
100 Use Cases were selected and mapped to a variety of automation
categories, including data extraction, transformation and
generation, process mining, workflows and visualization.
Citi’s digitalization took place on many levels. For example,
FRSS applied robotic process automation (RPA) techniques to
automate data extraction and consolidation. A chatbot was deployed
across Finance and FRSS – a virtual assistant named LuCi – that
could immediately answer user queries from well-developed FAQs. Use
of optical character recognition (OCR) was deployed in processing
of client tax forms, which accelerated the process by 80%. The use
of a deep process mining system also uncovered delays or
unnecessary hand-offs, and improved the straight through processing
(STP) rate to over 95% for a key report.
In the end, delivery cycles and quality for many processes
improved materially. Overall, FRSS’s digital efforts are now also
yielding considerable cost reduction for Citi.
Mondelēz International – Winner, Order-to-Cash (Predictive
Cash Management) – OTC
Mondelēz International, a global snack food giant, is leading
the future of snacking for consumers world-wide by offering the
right snack at the right moment made the right way. As part of the
company’s consumer-centric strategy and focus on operational
excellence a spotlight to improve aspects of its receivables
operations was necessary. In 2020, the company still handled many
of its cash collection frameworks manually, with limited
standardization, and room for improvement was recognized.
Global and regional views were pulled together manually, and key
aspects of the cash collections process were unsupported by rich
insights or reporting. Non-standard data and distributed data
sources made it hard for collection agents to access the right
information at the right time.
To improve this situation, the Mondelēz International team
developed an analytics product called Predictive Collections, which
uses AI (artificial intelligence) to predict late customer
payments. Analyzing three years of multi-market data, the system
learned to accurately predict payment performance 85-93% of the
time.
Today, Predictive Collections is giving teams clearer
segmentation of data and helping prioritize which customers to
contact. With the system’s guidance, teams can now move away from
dunning the highest-value customer first to contacting customers
who are most likely to make timely payment.
This investment in digital is yielding material returns, with an
improvement in overdue cash collection and a reduction in effort by
the collections teams.
Reckitt – Winner, IT Opportunity-to-Deployment – NextGen IT
Ops Living Labs
Reckitt, the health, hygiene, and nutrition giant behind some of
the world’s most recognized and trusted consumer brands like
Dettol, Lysol, Durex, Air Wick, Finish and many more, is also
passionate about keeping the consumers and people first. With a
vision of "the most delightful service experience with always-on,
always-available IT services,” Reckitt has embarked on transforming
IT Operations to NextGen IT Ops #NIO. Partnering with Infosys, a
global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting,
Reckitt conceptualized the Living Labs to drive automation at scale
and transform it into an Experience First, Cognitive
Enterprise.
By effectively leveraging AI, machine learning, RPA and digital
workflows, Reckitt and Infosys teams relentlessly pursued
personalized IT services for Reckitt employees. These cover Iris: a
multilingual, persona-based, omnichannel chatbot; Assist NOW
Mobile: a consumer-grade mobile app; Automation Factory: producing
an army of bots to takeover most IT operations tasks with
self-healing capabilities; and Digital Brain: predicting future IT
events, detecting anomalies, and generating recommendations to
improve services constantly, thus making Reckitt more
data-driven.
The Living Labs has delivered spectacular results. Employee
happiness (independently measured as net promotor score) has risen
from +68 in 2020 to +81 today, leading the industry benchmark. This
program has already saved 20% IT cost and more than 10,000 hours
every month by reducing IT resolution wait time. 200,000+
interactions were handled in 14 different languages by Iris in the
last 12 months, while 15% of tickets are resolved with no human
interventions. The system paid for itself in seven months, and
every British pound invested is estimated to return a pound in
ongoing savings. The Living Labs continues to deliver more
features, thereby providing the most delightful and futuristic
experiences for Reckitt employees and bringing more savings month
on month.
Vodafone Procurement Company – Winner, Source-to-Purchase –
Vodafone Blockchain Price Manager
Vodafone Procurement Company, the procurement arm for the global
telecommunications company, oversees the vast majority of
Vodafone’s 25bn€ yearly expenditure. With more than 540,000
products and services being procured from more than 10,000
suppliers, managing and executing pricing conditions and discounts
was challenging and time consuming. Many of the commercial
conditions were documented in contracts as embedded documents (in
the form of PDF and Excel files), making the review and update of
pricing conditions labor intensive and error prone.
To address this problem, Vodafone developed a ground-breaking
Blockchain-based distributed ledger system. This provides assurance
and data on each pricing agreement in real time, eliminating a
variety of manual processes and ensuring that changes to pricing
conditions are applied in real-time to all new and in-flight orders
to suppliers. Thus, securing that the supplier is paid the exact
amount owed as per the latest agreed commercial terms, and securing
there is no value leakage for Vodafone.
The team experimented with a minimum viable version of the Price
Manager program for six months, after which it rolled out the
system to the entire company.
Price Manager improved efficiency of the pricing creation
process by 80%, even as it sped up logging of price updates from a
lag time of several days to instantaneous recognition. More
accurate data is now beginning to help commercial managers to
benefit faster from better prices and discounts with its suppliers.
Executives predict that once the majority of their suppliers have
adopted the system, any leakage from price changes will be
completely eliminated.
Wipro Limited – Winner, Hire-to-Retire – AI Led HR
Transformation for Employee Onboarding and Engagement
Wipro Limited is a leading global information technology,
consulting and business process services company. To accelerate
performance and increase the impact of its Human Resources Shared
Services (HRSS), Wipro, through its Artificial Intelligence (AI)
solutions group, implemented intelligent interventions across HR
processes, to enable a comprehensive AI led digital
transformation.
Wipro’s HRSS serves the mission of onboarding new employees and
keeping the firm’s current employees engaged. The company needed a
solution to speed up processes across Hire-to-Retire lifecycle and
deliver more business value. But the project faced the significant
challenge of serving over 200,000 employees serving clients across
six continents, and that population continued to grow rapidly.
Processes also varied dramatically between countries and needed
manual inputs. Wipro leveraged its Enterprise Intelligence Quotient
(EIQ) framework to reimagine user journeys and streamline
processes.
Wipro AI solutions group built a combination of smart data
capture, AI, intelligent process automation, and chatbots, along
with state-of-the-art AI and deep learning algorithms. Wipro Holmes
AI platform, neural networks, and advanced pattern recognition
systems were leveraged to transform data and operational processes.
The project team made extensive use of conversational AI, designed
to give new employees an enhanced experience as they make their way
through onboarding paperwork. This automation reduced costs and
processing times dramatically. Cognitive bots verify new employees’
background documents in 1.5 minutes on average, ten times faster
than before. An Intelligent Process Automation solution also sped
up the digital assessment process, reducing evaluation time from
two minutes to 15 seconds. Total onboarding time fell from 7-8 days
to 3-4 days. For other tasks, the use of bots improved productivity
by as much as 200%. Overall, the project saved the center $25
million a year and transformed Wipro HRSS to an intelligent
enterprise.
Philips – Finalist – BPM Automation and Digital Command
Center
Three years ago, Philips began an enterprise-level Robotic
Process Automation project supported by Infosys BPM and saved 1
Million Hours in labor for the finance function, using RPA
solutions and lean practices.
After simplifying and standardizing the industrial
conglomerate’s financial processes, Infosys BPM worked with Philips
to set up a digital command center to manage the company’s growing
numbers of microbots. The greater transparency the digital center
created allowed Philips to prioritize service tickets based on
their relative importance.
The digital command center reduced the manual effort required to
monitor digital workers by 30% and decreased turnaround time to
resolve issues by 50%. Today, the initiative has met its one
million hour savings target and slightly exceeded its headcount
reduction goals. At the same time, it has delivered business
benefits worth $24.5 million, improved productivity by 35% in three
key domains, and when COVID hit, enabled all digital workers to
work from home within 10 days.
Johnson & Johnson – Finalist – COVID Global Site Capacity
Monitoring
To support the health and safety of its global workforce,
Johnson & Johnson’s Facilities Management team needed accurate,
real-time data that tracked individual site capacity and
utilization at every Johnson & Johnson facility. When it was
determined that the current solution would not provide the level of
reporting needed, the team built a new data ecosystem and tool in
12 weeks.
The new tool compiles 15 million records daily and offers a
statistical regression model to provide missing information and to
detect spikes or dips in site utilization. Dynamic filtering
capabilities allows leaders to compare facilities by a variety of
different metrics.
Today, the tool has improved data consolidation and reporting
data, making it possible to deliver reports that are 90% accurate
and 95% on time. Most importantly, its real-time cumulative
insights have given leaders confidence they can meet larger
COVID-19 challenges, most important among them keeping employees
safe and well. The improvement of the data bank has also given
Johnson & Johnson the opportunity to strengthen its ability to
identify new patterns and trends in workplace demand and usage to
fuel innovation in workplace design and the employee workplace
experience.
Takeda Pharmaceuticals – Finalist – CFOinUrpocket
Global acquisitions had left Takeda Pharmaceuticals with an
overly complex finance ecosystem that operated across a variety of
different acquisitions and databases. The pharma giant’s growing
technology debt, combined with a decentralized management
structure, was making gathering financial information increasingly
difficult and complicated.
To solve this problem, the finance team decided to build
CFOinUrPocket, a global finance dashboard based on an AI-fueled
business intelligence platform that would increase efficiency,
enhance the user experience, and deliver better outcomes.
Since its launch in 2016, the system has increased company
efficiency in large and small ways. While CFOinUrPocket has
improved system-wide transparency, it has done so without making
the whole system overly centralized. In fact, local units now have
the ability to prepare product portfolios that match their local
sales priorities. On a more macro scale, forecast accuracy in
Europe and Canada has improved 15%, and the financial planning
& analysis team has more time to focus on delivering increased
value. Finance team members are now equipped to advise, support,
and challenge their respective business partners with data and
trend analysis.
Wm Morrison Supermarkets plc – Finalist – AI and RPA-Driven
AP Revenue Leakage Detection
At most large companies, about 1% of accounts payable are
typically lost to recurrent leakage, and 35% regularly report
procurement non-compliance despite the best processes & ERP
systems. Morrisons, the United Kingdom’s fourth-largest
supermarket, wanted to plug such leaks.
Wipro Limited, technology partner to Morrisons, proposed rolling
out the firm’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) based anomaly detection
solution based on Wipro Holmes. When it got the go-ahead, the AI
models were set to look for procurement anomalies and compliance
violations. Wipro engineers also built Robotic Process Automation
bots on identifying anomalies in payment and controls.
Leveraging Wipro’s AI solution, Morrisons was able to make a
transition from random sampling of invoices to an exhaustive AI-led
audit. In fact, the new system can scan over £8 billion of
transactional data and run 15 predefined AI models in just a few
hours. Morrisons has emerged with more than peace of mind from the
upgrade: Wipro Holmes now saves the company £2 million a year in
avoided revenue leakage.
About The Hackett Group
The Hackett Group® (NASDAQ: HCKT) is an intellectual
property-based strategic consultancy and leading enterprise
benchmarking firm to global companies, offering digital
transformation including implementation of leading enterprise cloud
applications, workflow automation and analytics that enable digital
world class performance.
Drawing from our unparalleled IP from nearly 20,000 benchmark
studies with the world’s leading businesses – including 93% of the
Dow Jones Industrials, 91% of the Fortune 100, 80% of the DAX 30
and 55% of the FTSE 100 – captured through our leading benchmarking
platform, Quantum Leap®, and our Digital Transformation Platform
(DTP), we accelerate best practices implementations.
More information on The Hackett Group is available at:
www.thehackettgroup.com, info@thehackettgroup.com, or by calling
(770) 225-3600.
Cautionary Statement Regarding “Forward Looking”
Statements
This release contains “forward looking” statements within the
meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and
Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.
Statements including without limitation, words such as “expects”,
“anticipates”, “intends”, “plans”, “believes”, seeks”, “estimates”
or other similar phrases or variations of such words or similar
expressions indicating, present or future anticipated or expected
occurrences or outcomes are intended to identify such forward
looking statements. Forward looking statements are not statements
of historical fact and involve known and unknown risks,
uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company’s actual
results, performance or achievements to be materially different
from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied
by the forward looking statements. Factors that may impact such
forward looking statements include without limitation, the ability
of Hackett to effectively market its digital transformation and
other consulting services, competition from other consulting and
technology companies who may have or develop in the future, similar
offerings, the commercial viability of Hackett and its services as
well as other risk detailed in Hackett’s reports filed with the
United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Hackett does not
undertake any duty to update this release or any forward looking
statements contained herein.
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210713005675/en/
Gary Baker, Global Communications Director - (917) 796-2391 or
gbaker@thehackettgroup.com
Hackett (NASDAQ:HCKT)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2024 to Oct 2024
Hackett (NASDAQ:HCKT)
Historical Stock Chart
From Oct 2023 to Oct 2024