Accenture, FAO, Bundled

Recipes for Bundled Finance and Accounting Outsourcing

At a high level, bundled outsourcing is a strategy for building scale, creating synergies and shedding costs by outsourcing several business functions to a single services provider. It isn’t about offloading poorly managed processes or simply consolidating vendors and sub-processes.

Less clear, however, may be all the ways that outsourcing to a single services provider unlocks business value.

After all, when business functions are outsourced to multiple providers, scale opportunities are sacrificed and extra “failure points” (complete with blurred lines of accountability and governance) are added. Take one of the world’s largest consumer goods manufacturers, which outsources human resources and learning/ training to a single services provider. This combination has resulted in less turnover, better recruiting, and employees who leverage more-relevant skills in fewer work hours. There’s also a top electronics retailer that lowered its IT costs, reduced technology complexity and governance, and freed up capital by concurrently outsourcing key business applications and IT infrastructure. And a Big Pharma company outsourced procurement and HR, thus improving its ability to more cost-effectively acquire recruiting, temporary staffing, training and benefits services. So what about the finance & accounting function? Are the opportunities to bundle F&A with other business processes just as great? Absolutely! According to Everest Group, finance is often the “hub” of a bundled outsourcing arrangement¹. Here are three examples.

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¹Source: Everest Group: "Finance & Accounting (FAO) Annual Report." (c) December, 2006.