There is near universal agreement that BP began the corporate business processing outsourcing trend in 1991, when it outsourced its North Sea accounting function to Accenture. Since then, BP has outsourced all its financial and accounting work, employing both PwC and Accenture to ensure it retains some competitive tension between outsourcers. BP gives PwC its downstream work in Europe and Accenture its downstream work in the US. The latter does the exploration finance in the UK, the former in the US.
Mark Spelman, head of resource Industries for the UK and Scandinavia at Accenture, points out that the results achieved by BP as a consequence of its innovative approach to BPO more than bear out its success. "Today BP's costs in accounting are less than 50% of what they were in 1991, despite very substantial increases in the work load, and the acquisition of large companies such as Amoco and Arco." When Accenture took over BP's finance functions in Aberdeen, the company had 14 to 15 disparate accounting groups in locations all round the UK.
Accenture pulled them all together in a singe data centre in Aberdeen and took on some 320 BP staff. Its initial cost reduction target was 30%, but as Spelman explains, BP's central objective was to achieve a more holistic approach to running its back office.
This contract laid the foundations for Accenture's BPO venture. Since then the Aberdeen centre has expanded substantially. As Spelman notes, other oil companies followed BP once the value of BPO began to be obvious.
"If you look at the cycle of the last 10 years, we had BP renewing their contract in 1994, Conoco signed up in 1995, Talisman in 1997 and BP renewed again in 1999. At the same time several other oil companies have signed up and the BPO model has extended out to other industry sectors."
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