Lifting the lid on Powered Enterprise Lifting the lid on Powered Enterprise
Patrick Fenton, Global Lead Partner Powered Enterprise, shares how KPMG’s Powered Enterprise solutions can help business functions of all types rapidly modernise with a high level of certainty.
Why is being digitally enabled so important to business functions right now?
Through COVID-19, the most resilient companies have been the most digitally enabled companies. This has created impetus for businesses to undertake digital transformation. This is exactly what we set up Powered Enterprise to do. We designed Powered Enterprise to get our clients started with a model answer, achieve value quickly and sustain that position over time.
We hear a lot about digital transformations not living up to expectations. Why is this the case?
A lot of people, when they think about moving to the cloud, or moving to software as-a-service, think it's about the technology, but it's actually not about the technology. It's about driving different business outcomes. In order to do that, you need to look beyond the technology to your operating model, which includes your people, your processes, your data and your controls, as well as technology. All need to be designed to work together to drive the outcomes you are looking for.
How does KPMG Powered Enterprise help to overcome these challenges?
KPMG takes a business-led approach to change, and that's what we bring to our Powered Enterprise clients.
Powered Enterprise is a set of solutions that help our clients transform their business functions. Drawing on our deep functional expertise, we have built a comprehensive set of solutions covering all aspects of the operating model for the function. 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.
What are the three parts to Powered Enterprise?
Firstly, the Target Operating Model helps you establish the design for what your function will need to look like, across process, people, the service delivery model, technology, performance insights and data, and governance.
Secondly, there’s Powered Execution Suite, where we bring our range of tools and approaches to implement those solutions quickly and securely with reduced program risk.
Thirdly, there’s 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 always up to date.
It sounds like you’re bringing deep knowledge of ‘what good looks like’ to functions to help them get to this outcome quickly?
Yes, it’s knowing what good looks like, and bringing to our clients our pre-engineered working solutions that makes the 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 also get the acceleration, because you start with something that is detailed and is proven to work, in the real world.
What business functions can Powered help to transform?
In the front office, we have sales, marketing 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.
What cloud platforms does Powered work with?
We work with many leading cloud platforms. We find the right solution for each function and organisation to suit their future-state vision and their broader technology strategy.
Why would people come to KPMG rather than to a software vendor?
A vendor will give you the technology, but not a business transformation. We also bring functional expertise – for example, we know what it takes to design an end-to-end finance function. We’re also able to bring all of the KPMG services to bear on the solution. Not just consulting, but for example our audit heritage, risk experience, tax and cyber security.
What are some of the really tangible benefits that functions can get from a Powered solution?
You have high confidence that the solution is going to deliver what we consider to be ‘best practice’ for your function, because we have benchmarks and know the performance level of Powered. You know that you're getting a high-quality design solution for your business, and you’re getting something that works because it's tried and tested and has been delivered hundreds of times. You’re also getting something that offers faster time-to-value because we start with the pre-build solution.
Powered Enterprise also helps the function to deliver better insights from data and analysis, so that it can help drive better decision making across the entire business. Another benefit is that it helps to establish a robust control environment and increasingly, it’s also about managing sustainability, for example in the supply chain.
How does Powered Enterprise link into KPMG’s Connected solution?
At KPMG, we believe that the future enterprise will be Connected, Powered, and Trusted. Our Connected offer is about making sure organisations can rebuild around customers to create a borderless organisation, where people, data and technology interact for new levels of productivity and value creation. Powered is a way of achieving this using Software as a Service (SaaS) based solutions. Powered gives organisations the right foundation to do this.
