Case Study: Accenture achieves real-time global lease accounting and centralized portfolio planning with SAP HANA

Modernizing Real Estate Capabilities with SAP During Times of Disruption

Accenture, a global professional services firm with 738,000 people, faced the challenge of managing a fast-changing, costly real estate portfolio across dozens of countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Legacy, manual systems made it difficult to comply with new IFRS 16 lease accounting rules, run timely “what‑if” scenarios, right‑size space, and consolidate data for global planning and finance.

Accenture migrated lease master data into SAP S/4HANA Flexible Real Estate (RE‑FX), built an SAP HANA data mart and Google data lake, and used SAP Analytics Cloud for planning to create a centralized, integrated portfolio planning solution. The result was automated lease accounting and real‑time reporting (down from ten business days), a single source of truth across 50 countries/200 cities, fewer manual processes (30 processes consolidated to one), improved accuracy and compliance, and faster, data‑driven decisions during the pandemic.

Accenture

Margaret Smith

Senior Managing Director Corporate Services & Sustainability and Business Operations