Simplifying the IT landscape
A Big Four professional services firm, KPMG LLP (KPMG), generates almost $10 billion in revenue providing audit, tax, and advisory services. As part of the KPMG global organisation, the company’s US entity represents approximately one-third of global earnings and operates across all 50 states.
Known for its expert services, KPMG has a highly mobile workforce devoted to service delivery. A central focus of the company’s enterprise strategy is to consolidate and modernise its IT landscape and support model for better workforce efficiency, mobile experience and risk management.
Early on in its digital transformation, KPMG selected Enterprise Service Management from ServiceNow as its central platform, supporting workflows for five distinct areas of KPMG’s operations. Led by executive sponsor and Chief Enterprise Architect Aaron Purcell, the transformation team began work on Integrated Risk Management and Employee Center to reduce technical debt and improve legacy processes.
Find, frame and fix processes
KPMG has a myriad of processes for service delivery, onboarding, ordering and virtually every other work effort across the organisation. To gain the most value from modernising these processes by moving them into ServiceNow, KPMG chose first to understand them in detail using Celonis Process Mining.
Beginning with IT processes, KPMG takes a data-driven approach to identify ways to streamline actions, flag potential break points and quantify the associated impact. Too much to undertake manually, this effort is automated using Celonis Process Mining Platform—ServiceNow’s preferred process mining partner. Issues exposed by Celonis are prioritised and resolved within ServiceNow with low-code development. This time-saving approach accelerates the movement of workloads into ServiceNow and yields streamlined processes for better employee productivity and adherence.
“With ServiceNow and Celonis, KPMG builds its risk expertise into processes—improving experience, policy adherence, and auditability”, says Purcell. “Processes in motion are transparent, making it easier to quantify risk driven by deviations or bottlenecks and prioritise fixes.”
“With ServiceNow, we now look at processes through a quantitative, fact-driven lens”, says Purcell. As we move into the future, Celonis and ServiceNow can help us improve source-to-pay processes, creating immense value for KPMG.
Centralising risk and compliance
Rapid regulatory response and policy adherence tracking are key to KPMG’s continued success. As a regulated entity, the company follows strict protocols for conducting business with clients and determining that accepted engagements comply with all government regulations.
“ServiceNow will help us ensure that there are no conflicts prior to an engagement and that we have direct personal independence”, says Purcell. “By moving risk management into ServiceNow, we centralise and improve governance”.
KPMG is refining the way it tracks adherence to risk policies, moving some of its risk manual into Integrated Risk Management to further enhance adherence tracking. As risk models continue to move into ServiceNow, the team can trace exceptions as well as automate specific alerts. When a time-limited exception expires, for example, ServiceNow can trigger a notice to refile the exception or approve adherence. Similarly, a laptop ordering process can dynamically display an acceptable use policy.
“With the help of ServiceNow, employees will be able to reliably follow processes and do their jobs anywhere without risk to our operations”, says Purcell.
As regulations evolve, KPMG needs to track changes and make all necessary coding edits as efficiently as possible. “ServiceNow will enable us to put the distributed development functionality or low-code capabilities into the hands of those who respond to regulatory changes, so updates happen faster and drive compliance across the company”, says Purcell.
Risk activities previously spread across multiple legacy systems are being consolidated onto the ServiceNow platform. IT has tightly coupled risk security response functionality with Security Operations. ServiceNow also provides a path for reporting risk events and executive dashboards.
Self-service employee centre
KPMG leverages Employee Center to provide faster, better support for its highly mobile workforce, making risk management readily accessible and enabling visibility across the enterprise. Its intuitive self-service design makes it easy to find what’s needed without having to wait for assistance. IT, risk, finance and accounting, HR, and legal workflows are all accessible through a single portal with a common language oriented towards getting work done.
For those needing more assistance, Virtual Agent front ends all five help desks on Employee Center, and for personalised support, users can still be routed to a live agent. With this tiered approached, KPMG improves productivity across the board, as evidenced by the dramatic drop in queue times for service desk and help desk functions.
“ServiceNow gives fast access to processes and support in one portal. Employees spend less time navigating back-office systems and have more client-facing time”, says Purcell.
Going forward, AI is front and centre for KPMG. “We’ve spent a lot of time with ServiceNow’s AI team discussing natural language interactions”, says Purcell. “We see a future where an employee can engage with a virtual agent that anticipates questions based on user profiles and gives answers that include summaries of risk activities”.
Maximising returns
Streamlining how the business manages risk has been a tremendous benefit to KPMG and it also creates a more modern user experience. KPMG back-end teams use lower-cost resources to administer activities and the growing popularity of mobile self-service has reduced pressure on live agents. “Now a partner or manager in the field will be able to respond to a risk activity through Employee Center. That’s a huge benefit for us”, says Purcell.
From Purcell’s perspective, the more KPMG integrates ServiceNow, the greater the benefit to the organisation. As KPMG retires legacy costs and accelerates the movement of workloads into ServiceNow, the company sees savings. “ServiceNow reduced our costs significantly”, says Purcell.
From strategy to fruition
Propelled by interest in Employee Center, groups across KPMG now want in. “We championed our vision to a lot of people in a short period of time”, says Purcell. “We now have other KPMG member firms asking us about the ServiceNow solution”.
Given the successful outcomes and its extensive experience with ServiceNow and Celonis, KPMG can offer its clients a connected, integrated risk management solution that combines the expertise of all three companies. “In effect, KPMG is client zero for this unique combined risk management solution”, says Purcell. “Our experience is a great benchmark for our clients”.