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APRIL 23, 2007
How Accenture One-Upped Bangalore It leads the pack in tech services, melding offshoring and classic consulting When the Indian outsourcing upstarts came on strong five years ago, it looked as if some giants of the $600 billion tech services industry would fall like top-heavy palm trees in a Category 4 hurricane. The Indians' combination of high quality and super-low cost flattened the stock prices and revenues of companies such as EDS (EDS ), BearingPoint (BE ), and Capgemini. Even mighty ibm (IBM ), the No. 1 tech services player, has struggled to rebound. One Western company has come through stronger than ever, though—and it did so by motoring straight into the eye of the storm. Accenture Ltd. (ACN ) has responded so well to the disruptions caused by Indian companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies, and Wipro (WIT ) that it stands as a model for how to deal with the downside of globalization. Accenture adapted quickly by combining the best aspects of the Indian offshoring approach with the company's primary activity, business consulting. By the end of Accenture's fiscal year this August, 35,000 of its 160,000 employees will be in India, where labor costs are less than half those in the U.S., up from only a handful in 2000. That formula not only allows it to compete with the Indian tech companies on price but also, just as important, combines the company's tech knowhow, outsourcing, business consulting, and expertise in particular industries in a way that the Indians can't yet match. Even Indian tech leaders are impressed. "At one time, I thought we'd be fortunate, and they wouldn't be able to deal with the shift. But they really embraced it," says Pramod Bhasin, chief executive of Genpact, the top player in Indian business process outsourcing. One need look no further than Detroit to see what disasters can befall a company when it's too set in its ways to recognize a mortal threat. In contrast, Accenture spotted the Indian upsurge early and responded quickly. To block Indian companies from getting footholds in its accounts, it took on lower-end jobs. And it invested heavily in new capabilities to stay ahead of rising competition. Accenture's strategy is now being recognized as the preferred business model for the global tech services industry. Competitors, including the Indians, are scrambling to replicate it. "This gets companies away from competing on labor costs alone," says analyst Dana Stiffler of AMR Research. Accenture has long seen itself as a global organization. In 1985, as a unit of Andersen Worldwide, it established financial-services operations in Manila. "We have been operating a global virtual company for decades, so we had a lot of advantages other companies didn't have," says CEO Bill Green, a 30-year veteran. The consulting group split off from Andersen Worldwide in 2000 and went public a year later. The stock price has soared 140% since then. Goldman, Sachs & Co. (GS ) analyst Julio C. Quinteros Jr. forecasts revenues of $18.8 billion for this fiscal year, up 13%, and $1.6 billion in profit, up 16%. HARD TO MATCH That IPO year was a turning point. Accenture already had large business consulting and tech services branches. But in 2001 top managers committed to aggressive expansion of their business process outsourcing unit, which handles human resources and accounting chores. They expanded rapidly in India and other low-cost countries and ran their far-flung service delivery centers as an integrated global network. To see how Accenture is offering hard-to-match services, take a look inside the company's Life Sciences Center of Excellence in Bangalore. The sprawling office building houses dozens of medical doctors, PhDs, pharmacists, math whizzes, and statisticians. They work alongside biology grads to prepare clinical trial reports for the world's top drug companies. These high-skill employees—all of them Indian—coordinate closely with business consultants who are on site with clients around the world. Accenture consultants help clients revamp the way they handle the trials essential to getting new drugs approved by regulators. Once those processes are sharpened, Accenture software programmers in Bangalore design databases and algorithms for storing and analyzing clinical data. Accenture people distribute electronic forms to physicians who conduct the trials. Accenture's physicians review the data to spot errors and, when necessary, get on the phone with doctors conducting the trials. When all the data are collected, they analyze them for safety and effectiveness and write reports. All told, Accenture has cut the average time to prepare reports from six months to a few weeks. Each day saved is worth about $1 million to a drug company. But just as important, one client, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Inc. (WYE ), says it has been able to hand off huge chunks of work to a partner that can perform them even better than it can. "We are launching drugs that otherwise would have been held up by our inability to handle the work," says Robert R. Ruffalo Jr., Wyeth's president of research and development. Accenture's Indian rivals are rapidly adding new capabilities, such as expertise in specific industries like pharma and retailing. Western corporations increasingly consider the best of the Indian firms when they reengineer how they do business. But Infosys and its Indian brethren have a long way to go to catch Accenture. It has 13,000 business consultants and announced plans on Mar. 19 to double that number over the next three years. Ruffalo, the Wyeth research boss, says he hired Accenture consultants to help out with most of the 70 "breakthrough" projects he has undertaken over the past five years. "There are a lot of good consulting companies out there, but [Accenture] knew us and understood us," he says. "We don't have to educate them again and again."  By Steve Hamm
BW MALL
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