Lifting the lid on KPMG Powered Enterprise

Patrick Fenton, Global Lead Partner, KPMG Powered Enterprise, shares how Powered Enterprise solutions can help business functions rapidly modernize with a high level of certainty.

Through COVID-19, some of the most resilient companies have been the most digitally enabled companies. This has created an impetus for businesses to undertake digital transformation. This is what we set up Powered Enterprise to do. We designed Powered Enterprise to get clients started with a model answer and help them achieve value quickly and sustain that position over time.

A lot of people, when they think about moving to the cloud, or moving to Software as a Service (SaaS), think it's about the technology, but it's not always about that. It can be about driving different business outcomes. In order to do that, you should look beyond the technology to your operating model, which includes your people, your processes, your data and your controls, as well as technology. All of these outcomes should be designed to work together to drive the outcomes you’re looking for.

KPMG takes a business-led approach to change, and that's what we strive to bring to Powered Enterprise clients.

Powered Enterprise is a set of solutions that help clients transform their business functions. Drawing on our deep functional expertise, we have built a wide-ranging set of solutions covering all aspects of function’s operating model. It’s designed to help businesses get to ‘best practice’ quickly and securely, so that they can drive sustainable change and avoid a lot of the pitfalls that can come with traditional approaches to digital transformation.

Firstly, the KPMG Target Operating Model helps you establish the design for what your function should look like across processes, people, the service delivery model, technology, performance insights and data, and governance.

Through Powered Technology, we work with the world’s leading SaaS companies, to implement pre-built tools and methods that reflect leading practice and incorporate AI and advanced automation to simplify functional transformation.

Thirdly, there’s KPMG Powered Evolution, which is how we continue to support our clients after the initial transformation program is complete. An important characteristic of the cloud or subscription technology is that it’s constantly changing. When new features are delivered by the vendor, or there are changes to your business, we help to make those changes so that your operating model is up to date.

Yes, it’s knowing what good looks like and bringing clients our pre-engineered working solutions that can make a difference.

Most functions looking to transform start with how they do things today, and then think about changing from that starting point. That can be limiting. So, we start with the end in mind, and say, here's where you could get to.

This can make change management easier, because by showing people what the end looks like, you're starting to engage in the change management conversation earlier. You can also get the acceleration, because you start with something that’s detailed and is designed to work in the real world.

In the front office, we have marketing, sales and service. In the middle office, we have supply chain and procurement, and in the back office, we have finance, HR and IT. We’ve also developed a set of Powered solutions for risk, cyber and resilience.

We work with many leading cloud platforms. We can find the right solution for each function and organization to help suit their future-state vision and their broader technology strategy.

A vendor can give you the technology but may not be able to deliver a business transformation. We can also bring functional expertise – for example, we can design an end-to-end finance function. We’re also able to bring KPMG’s services to bear on the solution. Not just consulting, but for example our audit heritage, risk experience, tax and cyber security.

You should have confidence that the solution is going to help deliver what we consider to be ‘best practice’ for your function, because we have benchmarks and know the performance level of Powered solutions. We can provide a high-quality design solution that can work for your business because it's well tested and has been delivered hundreds of times. You’re also getting something that can offer efficient time-to-value because we start with the pre-built solution.

Powered Enterprise also helps functions deliver leading insights from data and analysis, so that it can help drive better decision-making across your business. Another potential benefit is that it can help establish a robust control environment and, increasingly, it’s also about managing sustainability – for example, in the supply chain.

At KPMG, we believe that the future enterprise will be Connected, Powered and Trusted. KPMG Connected Enterprise helps ensure organizations can rebuild around customers to create a borderless organization, where people, data and technology interact for innovative levels of productivity and value creation. Powered Enterprise is a way of achieving this using SaaS-based solutions. It can give organizations a strong foundation to do this.