KPMG turns business upside down

CHRIS GRIFFITH
September 29, 2016
The Australian
Turning a client business upside down so it can thrive in a digitally disruptive age is part of KPMG Australia’s modern mission statement. That was evident yesterday during a tour of its Barangaroo digs, where it claims to practice what it preaches. Staff at all levels including top executives these days work among each other in open spaces.
Clients access an innovation centre and insight lab where KPMG will help them pick apart their business, and identify signs of disrupters that might undermine their product value. In one room, the pot plants grow upside down from the ceiling, and the floor looks like the sky, symbolising the topsy turvy world of disruption.
KPMG is busy disrupting itself, converting routine human services into digital services that can be offered online to clients. The first two of these already are used by more than 100 clients: KPMG’s R&D Edge, a research and development tax management solution, and ESS Reporter, a tool for international companies to manage employee share schemes.
KPMG chief executive Gary Wingrove said the company had entered the software business. “We have more demand from within our business to digitise or develop some of these offerings than we can currently cater for.” KPMG would roll out another 8 applications this financial year and had a list of 15 to 20 more which would be developed based on client demand.
KPMG doesn’t envisage losing staff from transforming to online services. Staff rather could concentrate on offering strategic advice, and help firms understand their business. They’d still meet clients face-to-face where warranted. The move also would see more small and medium business use KPMG’s services.
KPMG chairman Peter Nash said many of KPMG’s clients were facing “an absolute imperative” to transform their businesses. “Surveys tell us that something like 50pc of CEO’s recognise the need to transform … something like 75pc of them believe that the next three years will be as important to their business than the last 50 years.”
KPMG said its digital shopfront headed by former chief information officer Anthony Stevens had grown to more than 50 designers, project managers and technology artists since its launch last year.
Mr Stevens said applications under development included streamlining indirect tax, direct tax, data and analytics, tax challenges and helping organisations assess their tax considerations. He said KPMG last year began a global alliance with Microsoft and it was using Microsoft’s Azure platform to get its technology to market.
Richard Marrison KPMG head of Technology Advisory detailed six “big bets” to help businesses transform. He said business needed to continue its journey in using cloud technology. It needed to embrace digital labour such as robotics, cognitive and analytic processes and use staff in a smarter way.
Business needed to offer consistent and tailored solutions to consumers no matter whether it’s online, in stores or with mobile. It needed to use the “internet of services”. He cited a global elevator manufacturer with sensors in 300,000 elevators that predicted maintenance needs.
Business also needed to act on the shift to a technologist in a corporation being one of broker, understanding the true value of what a business needed, and being able to orchestrate it.
Mr Nash said old technology development models no longer applied. “The SAPs and the Oracles of the world who are used to running billion dollar systems development implementation exercises are increasingly becoming a thing of the past because the technology is developed on a far more agile and much more cost effective basis.”
He said Australian banks that hadn’t invested in massive new systems implementations may have saved money. “ A few years ago the CBA solved that issue by doing a massive new systems implementation which has stood them in good stead. The banks that didn’t won’t have to go down that same pathway; by not making the decisions on a timely basis they may have inadvertently saved some money.”
Mr Wingrove said there was a slight decline in KPMG’s graduate numbers when some basic processes were offshored to India. “But that has since stabilised and increased as we hired increasingly more graduates into our consulting businesses.” KPMG was taking on more than 400 graduates a year and more had science and engineering backgrounds.