BP has outsourced finance and accounting (F&A) services to Accenture in a deal that will see the energy giant standardise processes and harness analytics.
Accenture will work alongside BP's in-house and captive centres.
The value of the multi-year agreement was not disclosed.
Accenture will help BP consolidate its global finance and accounting functions through the standardisation of reporting and metrics. Accenture will be responsible for providing record to report, order to cash, procure-to-pay and production revenue accounting services.
BP will use Accenture's business process outsourcing (BPO) technologies to drive end-to-end process standardisation and controls.
"BP sees this partnership with Accenture as an important milestone in driving standardisation in our finance and accounting processes by consolidating our F&A service providers," said Brian Puffer, group controller at BP.
Accenture is part of a huge ecosystem of suppliers in BP's a massive outsourcing strategy, which it has recently tightened up. For example, it spent 65% of its $3bn annual IT budget with 3,000 suppliers in 2008, but now it outsources to only seven and has reduced its annual IT budget by $800m as a result.
BP is a massive consumer of outsourced services across its business, and as a result the overheads associated with working with partners are massive. Taking IT in-house was not an option due to the company's size, global presence and confluence of diverse business functions.
