AECOM engineers a digital platform for growth

Client: AECOM

Region: North America

Sector: Professional services

Client challenge: AECOM needed to implement digital solutions to take advantage of its many opportunities for rapid growth

Solution: AECOM and Capgemini developed and implemented Cool Tool and iLabor to standardize its global finance and accounting processes while creating a more efficient digital future for its employees

Benefits:

• Cool Tool
  • 33% increase in efficiency
  • 66% reduction in invoice processing time from three days down to one
  • Self-service portal
  • Increased transparency
• iLabor
  • End-to-end processing time reduced from four to two days
  • 70% reduction in processing time per request from 56 to 17 minutes
  • 723 hours saved each month across the organization
  • Significant reduction in the amount of paper used
  • Anytime and anywhere accessibility through smart phones
  • Significant cost savings

Creating a foundation for growth

With almost 30 years of innovative leadership across multiple markets in 150 countries around the world, AECOM is an established provider of best-in-class engineering, architecture, and construction management services. To achieve this, the organization has developed a culture of innovation and commitment to the delivery of a best-in-class customer experience that is supported and maintained by each of the organization’s 95,000 employees.

Building on its continued success and momentum, AECOM identified the need to undergo a digital transformation journey and create a new
finance and accounting (F&A) platform that would facilitate its rapid growth. In addition to enhancing efficiency, speed, and transparency, this transformation would also need to address the lack of standardization across the organization’s teams and regions.

To ensure the maximum degree of success, AECOM needed a partner organization that could facilitate its transformation journey.

One team approach establishes transformation plan

Following a competitive bidding process, AECOM selected Capgemini based on its history of successful digital transformation projects and unique Global Process Model™ (GPM) methodology. These two aspects gave AECOM the confidence that an investment in the development and implementation of digital solutions would be rewarded with substantial gains.

With their partnership established, the organizations began the transformation journey with a joint session that identified AECOM’s vision for the future and the exact challenges it wanted to address. This gave Capgemini an understanding of AECOM’s primary goals, including standardizing F&A processes, developing and implementing a new digital platform, lowering the costs of talent acquisition and management, and creating a long-term transformation agenda.

With a detailed understanding of its partner’s circumstances and needs, Capgemini then carried out internal brainstorming session, during which industry and digital experts considered AECOM’s unique requirements and processes and developed proposals for a transformation plan that the team could later present. Following a second collaborative session, AECOM and Capgemini reached a final agreement on
the transformation approach the partners would follow throughout the journey.

Modern channels create a new journey

The digital transformation plan was based primarily on two new tools developed collaboratively by AECOM and Capgemini: Cool Tool and iLabor.

As a customized solution created especially for AECOM’s transformation project, Cool Tool standardized and streamlined the organization’s invoicing process by creating a repository to digitize and store client invoices. This enabled AECOM to create, share, and track client invoices more effectively, and rapidly close on outstanding invoices.

Through Cool Tool, AECOM gained a single portal for the end-to-end processing of invoices across all regions and teams. This limited the number of document formats and introduced a single way of working for invoice processing and tracking across all regions. Cool Tool also enhanced the efficiency and transparency of AECOM’s tracking database and the organization’s processing speed.

Implementation of Cool Tool quickly won over AECOM’s billers and has led to:

• 33% increase in efficiency
• 66% reduction in invoice processing time from three days down to one
• Self-service portal
• Increased transparency.

AECOM and Capgemini also designed the iLabor tool, a userfriendly, digital platform that enables AECOM’s employees to report their working hours correctly and submit any changes and corrections to their timesheets in a fast and effective manner.

The introduction of this solution addressed existing inefficiencies within AECOM’s working hour reporting process and empowered employees to more quickly make corrections. iLabor records and tracks time-sheet corrections without the need for any manual paperwork,
enabling AECOM to bill and collect revenue from its clients faster, eliminating the main cause for untimely payments to AECOM’s contactors.

iLabor transformed and simplified what had previously been a four-day process. As a result of this digital portal, the process is now as follows:

• The employee creates an account, which triggers the form to auto-populate with his or her information
• The employee enters their manager’s email address in the “Approver email” field and confirm by clicking the “Create form” button
• When the form is ready and the transfer reason is given, the employee clicks the “Submit for approval” button
• An email notification is sent to each of the approvers in the workflow – the employee and his or her manager – to review and approve the LCT.

The creation of iLabor leveraged Capgemini’s ESOAR (Eliminate, Standardize, Optimize, Automate, Robotize) methodology to first eliminate and standardize a number of manual processes and physical forms. This was followed by optimization through a new robotic process automation (RPA) interface to automate manual processes. Finally, iLabor enabled the partners to develop further robotics options that continued to build upon the success of the transformation.

Implementation of iLabor has led to a number of benefits, including:

• End-to-end processing time reduced from four to two days
• 70% reduction in processing time per request from 56 to 17 minutes
• 723 hours saved across the organization
• Significant reduction in the amount of paper used
• Anytime and anywhere accessibility through smart phone
• Significant cost saving.

Collaborative success

Through their collaborative, single-team approach, AECOM and Capgemini followed a mutually determined digital transformation journey. By sharing knowledge and information extensively and combining industry knowledge with an innovative, agile methodology, the partners created unique, best-in-class tools that reimagined the way AECOM operates. AECOM and Capgemini are now more eager than ever before to pursue further innovation as a single, unified team.

The success of this project has strengthened AECOM and Capgemini’s partnership, and the organizations are planning to build on the transformation journey to implement digital processes into other sectors of the business. These accomplishments represent AECOM’s continued commitment to innovation and provides yet more proof of Capgemini’s extensive capabilities as a transformation partner.

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