AKKA Technologies: Harnessing the Cloud to Help Deliver Services to Clients More Efficiently

The challenge

AKKA is one of many growing professional services organisations, in a market that is changing rapidly. With its ageing systems, it was difficult for the business to execute processes such as expense management and employee time recording, therefore invoicing clients promptly was challenging. Professional services businesses similar to AKKA have recognised the need to standardise, simplify and automate their business processes as a route to staying competitive and maximising profitability.

AKKA found an effective solution that would allow the company to solve its growth challenges and meet the needs of both clients and consultants. The company chose SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This cloud-based solution would allow them to respond faster to customer needs and opportunities, ultimately allowing their processes to be optimised and more efficient. 

Our approach

To meet these objectives, the group launched a program called “AKKA Towards Innovation”. To support this, Delaware utilised its industry expertise, deploying SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Concur for expenses management.  

Delaware built a template for AKKA that incorporated all of the standard processes and best practices that would be deployed in the first four countries. Adopting this standard solution allowed AKKA to deploy SAP S/4NANA Cloud faster and more economically, whilst still respecting the regulatory compliance requirements of each country.

The Delaware deployment allowed AKKA to leverage relevant capabilities within the SAP suite while still deploying in a similar timescale and cost to other products in the marketplace.

This approach allowed AKKA to gain efficiencies in all its divisions and reduce the cost to serve. By upgrading its back-office functions, it can now support growth without increasing cost, as well as benefit from a solution that will enable a better integration of end-to-end project management, resource engagement, retention and customer billing.  

Business benefits

Following the successful implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, AKKA has begun to experience the advantages of an enterprise standard cloud-based solution, which has enabled them to:  

• Perform and manage real-time integrated forecasting and business planning. This was impossible without access to live data across various systems. In turn this links directly to projects and operational resources, supporting faster and more informed decision-making.
• Reduce inefficient processes
• Utilise integrated timesheets
  • Web enabled posting of time and automated flow down to cost in financials
  • Automated time capture allowing transparent and prompt billing to customers 
  • Visibility and availability of resources for other contracts
• Eradicate skill and requirements mapping via spreadsheets or email:
  • Resource scheduling by skills required
  • Resource capacity and shortage reporting
• Increase financial system uptime and provide real-time reporting to respond to customer requirements
• Achieve faster month-end processing: realise an average of 2-3 days saving during monthly closings 
• Improve accuracy and timeliness of client invoices:
  • Less queries
  • Faster billing
  • Better cashflow
  • Reduced late invoicing of cost to customer  
• Improve ability to scale effectively to better integrate acquisitions, mergers or disposals 
• Improve customer service with one global, single, integrated solution, which allows AKKA to focus on customers at a project and divisional level, but that can show customer details and margin globally or wherever they trade in the global enterprise.

Most importantly, AKKA has established a solid business platform. By using SAP S/4HANA Cloud, they have access to a host of industry specific capabilities in the cloud, which are constantly updated and allow them to build a future-proof foundation which gives them the opportunity to adapt to market conditions, support growth and ultimately improve client satisfaction.

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