KPMG Survey: Executives Cite Customer Demand, Technology As Top Reasons They Are Changing Their Business Models

NEW YORK, Sept. 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Increasing and more sophisticated customer demands are forcing companies to adopt new business models and deploy advanced technologies to help improve productivity and better leverage financial resources, a new survey from audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG LLP indicates.

The KPMG survey of executives from more than 900 U.S.-based multinationals and asset management firms uncovered a new alliance between CFOs and CIOs. The survey findings were distributed today in advance of Oracle OpenWorld 2013, the world's largest conference for Oracle customers, partners and engineers, where KPMG will deliver presentations on transformational technology solutions using Oracle software.

"With the changing customer dynamic, CFOs and CIOs want the most strategic technologies to better manage the back office and the broader workforce in order to maintain margins in product or service delivery," said Stephen G. Hasty, a KPMG partner and U.S. Innovation Leader for Advisory, who leads the firm's Transformation initiative.

"Technology that is geared to help drive performance in support of a customer-centric focus is taking center stage," Hasty said. "In fact, more and more company leaders see that emerging IT advancements can drive business improvements to help them grow their business and maintain a competitive posture in the market, even amid rising costs for raw materials and narrowing margins for products."

Thirty-three percent of KPMG survey respondents said customer demand was the most common trigger for transforming their business model, while technology and domestic competition were tied for second (30 percent each), said the executives who could select more than one "trigger" in responding to the KPMG survey.

Hasty says that customer demands can range from wanting mobile access to be able to shop and pay for products and services, to expectations of better product quality and improved access to customer-service questions. The evolving C-suite link has CIOs scouring the increasingly crowded and complex technology landscape for the right solution to help operations meet those demands, while also helping the CFO oversee and measure how the organization can best make investments, improve performance, remain competitive and help drive growth.

Respondents to the KPMG survey said they believe new and emerging technologies were critical to the success of strategic initiatives planned in the next 18 months. Data and analytics and business process management tools (both 54 percent) scored highest in the survey, while respondents also selected mobile and core system modernization (both 49 percent), digital media (48 percent) and cloud (47 percent) as important to meeting their organizations' goals.

Stephen Chase, KPMG's service line leader for Technology, says transformation is about aligning and servicing your customer, optimizing your supply chain, and managing risk and tax issues, as well as about having a better view of the financials and an improved strategic oversight of the workforce.

"The CFO and CIO are deploying emerging technologies to help their operational peers across the organization implement more sophisticated reporting and analytics to improve measuring how their units are performing," said Chase. "Recent economic events underscored for many executives that transparency and agility has become increasingly important for businesses to predict and anticipate customer, competitive and market changes.

"Put simply, companies need to continually transform their organization's business model, using new and emerging technologies to help manage performance and cut costs," he said.

The majority (63 percent) of respondents from companies that are getting ready for, are undergoing, or have completed transformations say that they have a formal process for prioritizing business transformation initiatives.

"Undertaking broad changes to a business operating model—covering everything from the financial, risk and tax transformation, to human capital management, acquisitions and target markets—can create an operation that is innovative, agile, responsive to change, and focused on customers to get ahead of competitors and the marketplace," said Hasty. "Technology opens up the possibilities -- and pitfalls -- of cloud environments, social media interaction, data and analytics, and wide-scale mobility, creating entirely new industries and enterprises at the same time that they redefine how existing businesses operate and influence consumer choices.

"Constant change in the business environment requires internal and external capabilities with a deep and current knowledge of each component of a transformation effort – including market dynamics, regulatory and tax rules, technology advances, operational practices, and program implementation techniques," said Hasty.  "These individuals working closely within a program governance model can develop and execute on the optimal transformation strategy, helping to realize maximum value and return on investment."

The survey findings are part of a larger KPMG report on Transformation planned for a fall release. Respondents to the survey, conducted in June and July of 2013, included 67 percent from the ranks of C-level executives, while the rest were managing director or above.

About KPMG LLP
KPMG LLP, the audit, tax and advisory firm (www.kpmg.com/us), is the U.S. member firm of KPMG International Cooperative ("KPMG International"). KPMG International's member firms have 152,000 professionals, including more than 8,600 partners, in 156 countries.

KPMG's Presence at OOW

• Big Data: Fact or Fiction for Finance: Presented by - Xena Ugrinsky, Advisory, KPMG LLP. Everyone discusses the impact of Big Data, but what is the reality for Finance? This session looks at the evolution of the concept, and addresses what Finance could and should do to get ready to participate. Topics include: current market discussion, realities of what finance can do with big data, organizational readiness and practical limitations.

• Oracle Fusion HCM Implementation Experiences Panel: Presented by - Chris Lynch, Advisory, KPMG LLP. Many people ask if fusion is ready. Our panel discusses real fusion HCM implementations, the roadmap to fusion and the journey along the way. 

• PeopleSoft 9.2 Partner Experiences Panel: Presented by - Doug Stockel, Advisory, KPMG LLP. A panel of PeopleSoft partners from KPMG discusses their experiences with Release 9.2 of Oracle's PeopleSoft product family. This interactive discussion will explore deployments of PeopleSoft 9.2, how their PeopleSoft clients are measuring success, and how they plan to add value and reduce costs and customizations with their PeopleSoft 9.2 deployments. This session includes a live Q&A.

• Siemens' Fusion Global HCM and Payroll Transformation: Presented by - John Doel, Advisory, KPMG LLP. Siemens and KPMG will present an overview of Siemens' Global Shared Services HR Transformation initiative, which is being driven through the global deployment of Fusion HCM and Payroll for more than 70,000 employees. Key insights into the business case, deployment strategy, and critical value drivers will be discussed, as well as lessons learned and leading practices for maximizing value out of a global Fusion Payroll deployment.

• PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 Success Story – KPMG with Scott & White Healthcare: Presented by - Doug Stockel, Advisory, KPMG LLP, and Jeremy Pelley, Scott & White Healthcare. Poised to be one of the first organizations live on Oracle PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 this fall, Scott & White Healthcare has partnered with KPMG on their strategic HR transformation initiative. This discussion focused on the key functionality and usability enhancements that led Scott & White to select PeopleSoft 9.2 for their broad and expanding HCM footprint, and understand how KPMG's award winning RapidSolutions^SM methodology has helped dramatically reduce customizations and accelerate the project timeline.

• Major Accounting Standards Developments and their Impact on Oracle E-Business Suite: Presented by - John McGaw, Advisory, KPMG LLP. KPMG presents its analysis of the Financial Accounting Standards Board / International Accounting Standards Board lease-accounting exposure draft - published in May 2012, and on the Contracts with Customers final standard - published in September 2012: how they change the revenue picture dramatically for certain companies and affect the measurement of income, assets and liabilities. It discusses how to approach preparing for them and how important it is to understand the broad entity issues immediately. The presentation also includes Oracle's response and thinking on how Oracle E-Business Suite will support these standards.

• Better Audit Case Selection with Data Mining and XBRL: Presented by - Sebastian Koch, Advisory, KPMG LLP. In Germany, companies must file their balance sheets in a structured and electronic format prescribed through an Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) taxonomy. The filing process needs to be monitored and managed for compliance purposes, and the massive data stream needs to be processed. Through data-mining techniques, suspicious data and potential fraud can be better detected. This enables the tax and revenue authority to select only those cases for audit that really need attention. This session is a co-presentation of Oracle and KPMG.

• Access at Scale for Hundreds of Millions of Users Panel: Presented by -- Brendan McGuire, Director, KPMG LLP. It is no longer uncommon for identity management projects to have scalability requirements that exceed 100 million users.  As organizations move an increasing number of services online and begin extending identities to internet-aware appliances, it is critical to ensure systems can properly scale to accommodate demand. Various e-government initiatives need to provide online services to tens of millions of users. This session explores business cases that involve handling millions of users and the developments Oracle has introduced to support this need.

• Engineered Systems and Big Data in the Public Sector Panel: Presented by -- Carl Marsh, Director, KPMG LLP. Large, complex problems require extreme performance, and this has led many public sector organizations to embrace Oracle's engineered systems.  In this session, Oracle customers that have implemented Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Exalytics, and Oracle SuperCluster will discuss their most challenging information management problems, including unstructured data and advanced analytics. Learn what their decision-making criteria were, what design and implementation challenges they faced, and how these systems have benchmarked in real-world applications.

SOURCE KPMG LLP

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