Deloitte: Helping Businesses Evolve to Pursue the Vision of a Kinetic EnterpriseTM

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Darwin Deano, Global SAP Chief Technology Officer, Liz Fasciana, Global SAP Offering Leader, Jan Waals, Global SAP Chief Commercial Officer and Abdi Goodarzi, US SAP Offering Leader, DeloitteDarwin Deano, Global SAP Chief Technology Officer, Liz Fasciana, Global SAP Offering Leader, Jan Waals, Global SAP Chief Commercial Officer and Abdi Goodarzi, US SAP Offering Leader
Deloitte leadership in the enterprise technology realm—and in the SAP partner ecosystem— requires no introduction. The firm’s collection of SAP® Pinnacle awards (more than any other SAP partner), the analyst accolades, the achievements, the breadth of cutting-edge offerings and—most importantly—the client successes and endorsements all speak for themselves.

With great success and experience in enabling business value with SAP technologies, Deloitte has realized a need to disrupt business transformation ideology—from “built to last” to “built to evolve”—to help businesses thrive in this age of rapid, perpetual change.

“We’ve realized that ‘built to last” is outdated because the traditional focus of business transformation was to deliver value at ‘go live.’ But we’ve proven several times that the technology has evolved to deliver business value anytime,” says Jan Waals, Global SAP Chief Commercial Officer at Deloitte. “For example, at a Fortune 500 consumer client, we leveraged SAP HANA® and machine learning to enable a 30% reduction in cash application operational costs in parallel to defining the business case for the broader transformation. Why wait for value?”

“Whether it is macro factors like recession, trade wars and industry consolidations, or targeted topics like the evolution of SAP technology, no business can sit still,” says Liz Fasciana, Global SAP Offering Leader at Deloitte.“Our clients need the ability to keep pace with the business—to establish and orchestrate key capabilities like cloud, central finance, machine learning and advanced analytics, to pivot on demand and be ever-ready. In other words, to be a Kinetic Enterprise™.”

"The traditional business and IT operating models have been focused on specialization. In the cloud era, it is all about bringing it together – orchestrating different capabilities, services, applications, data, and business partners and making them work seamlessly, to ultimately drive and deliver value"

With the Kinetic Enterprise, Deloitte is helping clients reimagine business against the backdrop of ever-changing technology, geopolitical, and economic scenarios. And it goes beyond ERP or, more broadly, technology in general. “Through the breadth and depth of our capabilities, we understand that this is about more than just SAP technology. Businesses need to incorporate intelligence, embrace cloud, and integrate business and architecture ecosystems while maintaining the discipline to challenge unnecessary customization,” says Abdi Goodarzi, US SAP Offering Leader at Deloitte.

“The traditional business and IT operating models have been focused on specialization. In the cloud era, it is all about bringing it together—orchestrating different capabilities, services, applications, data, and business partners and making them work seamlessly, to ultimately drive and deliver value,” says Darwin Deano, Global SAP Chief Technology Officer for Deloitte.


Businesses need to incorporate intelligence, embrace cloud, and integrate business and architecture ecosystems while maintaining the discipline to challenge unnecessary customization


“Pursuing the Kinetic Enterprise will help them transition from the traditional ‘built to last’ practices to embracing the ‘built to evolve’ ideology. Of course, the Deloitte-SAP synergy is a big part of the equation.”

Kinetic Energy for Riding the Waves of Change

Deloitte defines the essence of the Kinetic Enterprise based on four pillars:

• Clean. It runs with a clean core, free from the business and technical debt that limits agility. It adheres tightly to leading practices enforced through rock-solid governance—freeing itself to embrace a “why not” attitude and innovate from the core to the edge.

• Intelligent. It enables enterprises to leverage intelligent automation technologies that unleash human potential.

• Inclusive. Its ecosystem of applications, services, and capabilities is extensive and diverse—going beyond the “usual” data, processes, and tools.

• Responsive. It responds rapidly to new demands, needs, and opportunities—leveraging the power of cloud to evolve at the pace of disruption.

Aligned with the Kinetic Enterprise is Deloitte’s Reimagine Platform, which taps the power of SAP® Cloud Platform capabilities such as machine learning to simplify technology and business complexity—driven by a “clean” ERP approach for minimizing business and technical debt.

“We have a portfolio of more than 60 microservices and applications that leverage machine learning, IoT, and analytics capabilities to deliver value using SAP technologies,” says Waals. Meanwhile, on the responsiveness front, the prowess of Deloitte’s OpenCloud and cloud managed services comes into play. “Deloitte has strategic alliances with the major cloud hyperscalers to enable industry-leading cloud services, which allows us to help clients focus on the business objective instead of which cloud partner to choose,” says Fasciana.

With a plethora of cloud-based platforms and purpose-built solutions at their disposal, it can be a daunting task for companies to navigate the market and identify the best-fit solution. For instance, consider solutions for cutting-edge analytics. While the functionalities and purposes of two offerings might be similar, there could be several distinctions, with each best fitting specific use cases. An entity such as Deloitte, which has immense experience with deploying these offerings, can help clients identify the “right” choice. The same holds true for adopting various cloud platforms and leveraging the combination of specific solutions and the measurable business value that they can bring. “We have cloud tax services to help self-fund a business transformation as well as our Total Cloud Value Calculator to help you understand the total cost to own and evolve, and the total value and benefit that you can get from the cloud,” says Goodarzi.

Despite the fact that Deloitte is a relative newcomer in broader cloud services, IDC and Gartner have already recognized the company as a market leader for cloud managed services and cloud professional services. The company has also received top recognition from SAP as the Digital Partner of the Year—winning the inaugural SAP Pinnacle Award for that category.

Practicing What They Preach: Enabling The Deloitte Digital Twin

SAP’s recent acquisition of Qualtrics will add more flair to the proven synergistic partnership between Deloitte and SAP. Qualtrics’ offerings address management of the human experience, helping to power a full-fledged Kinetic Enterprise. “Most organizations today fail to recognize the value of experience management,” says Goodarzi. “Be it customers, employees, or vendors, business outcomes are a result of these stakeholders’ experience.”

Just as Deloitte has embraced SAP technology as one of the biggest SAP S/4HANA® customers itself, the firm has begun integrating intelligent automation with human experience to unleash the “Deloitte Digital Twin”—to increase speed to value and enhance quality and efficiency in serving clients. The early results of pursuing this new way of client service has already yielded impressive results. “So far, we’ve reduced functional design effort by 40%, achieved 5× faster technical development, automated project management, and accelerated testing by at least 60%,” says Deano. “Not surprisingly, these early results are already helping inspire companies to embrace experience and intelligent automation to evolve their businesses.”

The Launchpad for Targeted Innovation

Deloitte’s Kinetic Enterprise changes the business transformation from a “one-time activity” to a “perpetual responsibility”—one that entails all stakeholders, processes, and aspects of an enterprise ecosystem. To help clients achieve that vision, Deloitte helps break down enterprise silos, automate every process that can be automated, and leverage the power of cognitive technologies for insights into processes—thanks in part to the SAP Cloud Platform and an array of microservices and capabilities that the Deloitte Reimagine Platform delivers.

Many clients that approach Deloitte with their most challenging technology and business problems often want to keep up with the unparalleled pace of change. “Whether it is the pursuit of higher margins in the consumer sector, the need to respond to the latest tax mandates, the implications of Brexit, or pursuing a growth strategy in China, Deloitte works side by side with clients to help them deliver results that often go beyond their expectations,” says Fasciana.

The Kinetic Enterprise is a calling for all businesses to achieve all four pillars: intelligent, clean, responsive, and inclusive. When a business addresses all these areas, success is inevitable, according to Deano. But when companies focus on only one or two areas, the potential is significantly sub-optimized.

Deloitte’s breadth of business and technology capabilities and experience helps it realize the Kinetic Enterprise—to solve clients’ real-world problems with unprecedented speed to value. Waals recalls an instance in which the company deployed SAP S/4HANA® Cloud for a client in a matter of 28 days. In comparison, many companies often take that amount of time just to plan a project.

Going forward, Deloitte understands the importance of having a lesser emphasis on one-time solutions. The need is to adopt a multidimensional and unified approach for uplifting the enterprise ecosystem as a whole—and develop the reusable capabilities that enable the business to pivot at any time. It will be the name of the game for enterprises to succeed in 2020 and beyond. Deloitte, as a strategic partner, has already sharpened its edge to guide enterprises in this journey—to help them be built to evolve.

- Joe Phillip
    December 13, 2019

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Deloitte buys Singaporean Blockchain Specialist Practical Smarts

Founded by Stanley Yong and Andrew Koay in 2017, Singapore-based digital consultancy Practical Smarts specialises in business, technical and regulatory advisory services on the use of asset-backed digital tokens within the financial services industry. Now, the firm has been absorbed into Deloitte’s Southeast Asian Risk Advisory practice, bolstering its Distributed Ledger Technology/Blockchain expertise.

“Digital technology is transforming the financial markets in the Southeast Asia region and Blockchain is a key component of this transformation. The team from Practical Smarts will complement Deloitte’s cyber and digital assurance services by securing the assets to be transferred over the network and the underlying transfer protocol,” commented Deloitte Southeast Asia CEO Philip Yuen.

As part of the deal (the terms of which haven’t been disclosed), Yong and Koay have both joined Deloitte as directors, and will together lead the Deloitte Blockchain Lab in Southeast Asia. Yong, after a brief stint at McKinsey (following an MBA with Spain’s IE Business School), would go on to spend nearly a decade as a deputy director with central bank MAS, latterly serving as Head of Innovation Acceleration.

From there, he co-founded Practical Smarts, while also serving IBM in Singapore in the capacity of CTO and Global Lead on Central Bank Digital Currency Solutions. Koay, meanwhile, kicked off his career at Arthur Anderson, and later Ernst & Young, as a senior risk consultant. He then spent close to a decade and a half as a vice president with banks UOB and OCBC, before serving as Head of Blockchain Tech for the SGX.

“With the acquisition of the top talents from the market this time, and the full support from Deloitte’s global network, we look forward to seeing huge success in both market eminence and business growth very soon,” said Paul Sin, Deloitte’s Blockchain Lab Leader for the Asia Pacific. “The establishment of the Southeast Asia Blockchain practice is our response to the ever-increasing demand from our clients.”

According to a press release, the new Lab – one of three regional labs and 1,500 practitioners globally – will serve clients looking to implement and deploy DLT/Blockchain solutions to address governance, regulatory, settlement and enforceability concerns. The Lab will also be hiring and training additional fintech experts (focused on digital and cyber security skills), while Practical Smarts’ employees have crossed to Deloitte.

“Blockchain is gaining momentum in the region and acceptance is growing across multiple industries,” said Yong. “The focus is now on production and implementation where risk management becomes a critical concern. With this transaction, together, we can generate more value to our clients, and we can leverage our shared knowledge and expertise to create sustainable and widely adopted business solutions.”



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