Technology growth platform
IT One Siam Cement Credential
Client Background
The Siam Cement Group (SCG) is Thailand’s
largest industrial business conglomerate
with more than 100 companies under
five business groups. It has approximately
38,000 employees and offers more than
64,000 products. SCG began as a cement
manufacturer and has diversified to meet
the needs of Thailand’s growing economy,
establishing and participating in new
industries as technology and market demand
warranted. At present, the group has
business interests in paper and packaging,
petrochemicals, cement, building materials
and distribution.
Business challenge
As part of a major restructuring program,
SCG sought to introduce fundamental
changes in the way it conducted business.
Emerging from the 1997 Asian financial
crisis, it needed to aggressively divest
non-core divisions and focus on its core
businesses to reduce costs, regain stability
and increase profitability. SCG decided to
outsource its information technology (IT)
functions and service delivery to gain access
to deep technical skills at a lower cost. The
objective was to align SCG’s IT landscape
with defined business needs to position it
as a high performance business. Accenture
and SCG shared an excellent, long-standing
relationship. This led SCG to form a joint
venture—IT One—with Accenture. By
collaborating with Accenture, SCG gained
access to recommended practices, insights
and skill sets to support and help enable
SCG’s growth agenda.
Today, SCG is looking to rapidly expand
internationally, particularly in the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region
as well as introduce value-added services and
products in each of its business lines. SCG
seeks to continue on this growth trajectory
with the help of the robust IT support and
services provided by IT One and Accenture.
How Accenture helped
In the initial contract that commenced in
2001, Accenture, through IT One, helped
SCG implement and manage Asia’s biggest
SAP customer relationship management
(CRM) enterprise solution and other large
enterprise business applications, delivering
on its target of 30 percent productivity
gains to the client. Accenture also provided
IT skills training to 240 employees of SCG’s
IT team and prepared them to implement
10 key strategic initiatives for IT and
e-commerce. They were trained to provide
complete IT business support, including
Web-based applications, ERP, SCM, CRM
and e-commerce infrastructure. These
employees were later absorbed into IT One.
The first phase of IT One’s business plan
was so successful that in early 2004 SCG
renewed its agreement with Accenture
to continue with IT One for an additional
four years. In this second phase, IT One’s
challenge was to continue to deliver worldclass IT services that further increased
capability and efficiency to SCG as well
as to become a powerful end-to-end
service provider in Thailand’s IT market.
To help achieve this vision for IT One,
Accenture worked with SCG on multi-tiered
outsourcing and technology programs with
Accenture continuing to take responsibility
for infrastructure and applications
outsourcing as well as key systems
integration projects.
Infrastructure Outsourcing
The backbone of the initial engagement was
infrastructure outsourcing (IO). Accenture
provided, and continues to provide, ongoing
infrastructure management of IT One’s
infrastructure functions, including service
desk support for technology incidents
and requests, end-to-end management
of distributed computing environments,
delivery of consistent and secure network
experience, optimizing IT spend and helping
to enable a secure and stable environment.
In fact, with a staff of 120 infrastructure
personnel, IT One manages all applications
across all business units for more than
100 SCG group companies. In addition,
Accenture helped design and develop one of
the largest virtualized data centers for SCG.
This cutting-edge virtualized environment
supports the entire application suite with
uptime and service level agreements (SLAs)
for critical applications like ERP, Web
applications that touch customers and
internal mail systems, among others. The
data center hosts external clients with
more than 370 managed servers and 200
managed WAN links. It provides the full
spectrum of IO domain offerings from
centralized service desk to the data center,
security, network and workplace services to
all its clients.
Application Outsourcing
In the application outsourcing (AO)
space, IT One manages more than 160
applications and provides 24x7 support. The
full suite of services includes application
development, application maintenance,
production support, enhancements,
upgrades and testing, covering a wide
range of technologies including ERP,
SCM, CRM, e-business (especially Java),
business intelligence, data warehousing
and workflow management. IT One offers a
shared customer service desk that handles
incidents and requests for both applications
and infrastructure, supporting more than
25,000 users spread over 22 countries. The
service desk, with two levels of support,
handles more than 10,000 calls each month,
averaging above 400 daily calls. IT One
also manages more than 60 SAP systems
supporting 4000+ concurrent users and
100+ non-SAP applications. Underlining
its leadership position in SAP, IT One was
awarded the SAP Partner Awards 2007 for
“Best ERP Project- SAP Implementation” and
“Best Project with Leading Technology—SAP
CRM Implementation.”
Systems Integration
Leveraging leading processes, methods and
tools, Accenture has also helped with the
following key systems integration projects
to keep SCG competitive in the marketplace:
• Upgraded SCG’s enterprise-wide SAP
R3 system to Enterprise Edition 4.7.
The enhanced system serves more than
20,000 employees and 5,000 SAP endusers
• Helped implement the first SAP CRM
installation in APAC for SCG Chemicals &
Distribution
• Implemented leading supply chain
solutions from AspenTech & i2
• Helped with one of the largest PeopleSoft
HR implementations in the ASEAN region
• Implemented leading practice for
accounting shared service solutions
from SAP R3 and OpenText document
management/business process
management products
• Introduced several new technologies
across the enterprise, such as:
— Enterprise integration: enterprise
service bus and business process
management
— Virtualization: servers, storage
— Web applications
IT One completed the transformation into an
independent IT services vendor successfully,
adding prestigious companies such as Siriraj
Hospital, Mitr Phol Sugar and Bureau of
the Crown Property as its clients. Today,
IT One provides application development,
application management, customer support
and infrastructure support services to more
than 150 companies. The current contract
will run till 2015.
High performance delivered
With more than 400 employees possessing
extensive IT skills, including 250 SAP
professionals, best-in-class resources
and deep technology skills and industry
focus, IT One delivers solutions that make
a key difference to the profitability and
performance of its clients’ businesses.
IT One’s fast-paced, service-oriented
environment is highly responsive to the
business needs of its clients. Continuous
improvements in service quality, introduction
of new services and flexible pricing structures
provide the clients with improved cost
efficiencies and lower total operating costs
for their infrastructure services.
The integration of the entire infrastructure
and application landscape, with service
delivery across all offerings, was a new and
innovative way of delivering application
solutions that IT One pioneered in Thailand.
As a result, IT One can quickly analyze
and troubleshoot all incidents and service
requests. Process efficiencies, such as directto-dealer shipment, have helped to eliminate
most of SCG’s building-products warehouses
and cut product delivery times from two
weeks or more to a day or two. Other
tangible benefits delivered by Accenture
include:
• Transformed the in-house, decentralized
infrastructure service management
capability from a business unit-siloed
non-optimized environment to a stateof-the-art, centralized and virtualized
utility computing environment
• Introduced over 15 utility-based
infrastructure services
• Enhanced service levels with SAP R3
Actual Availability exceeding 99.94
percent in 2010
• Introduced ITIL-aligned service
management for an application portfolio
comprising more than 100 applications
• Consistently exceeded SLAs for Actual
Production Uptime across the application
portfolio
• Delivered year-on-year productivity
improvements over the life of the
contract
• Delivered 30 percent operational cost
savings over a three-year period
Today, IT One has expanded its service
footprint to 22 countries across the world,
added more than 150 companies to its client
list and serves more than 25,000 users. The
venture has provided SCG with access to
world-class IT skills, delivering even greater
value to the shareholders. Through the IT One
joint venture, Accenture has had a significant
and positive impact on SCG’s growth across
business units, helping the company to
realize its business goals and achieve high
performance.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management
consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company, with more than
246,000 people serving clients in more than
120 countries. Combining unparalleled
experience, comprehensive capabilities
across all industries and business functions,
and extensive research on the world’s most
successful companies, Accenture collaborates
with clients to help them become highperformance businesses and governments.
The company generated net revenues of
US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug.
31, 2011. Its home page is www.accenture.
com.
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