Transcript for "Inside KPMG’s AI-Powered Workforce Transformation":
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, Insight KPMG's AI powered workforce transformation. I'm Julie Vidal from Deltek, and before we begin, I have a few administrative items to note. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox. If you have a question, please type it in the q and a box anytime during the presentation. We'll address as many questions as we can at the conclusion of the webinar, and any questions left unanswered will be addressed individually offline following today's presentation. Resources, including presentation slides, are available to download in the Resources panel on your screen. All widgets can be resized to fit your computer screen. You will also receive the automated recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. We have a compelling session for you today, packed with actionable insights. Here's what to expect. We'll kick off with a brief introduction, dive into fireside chat with our expert speakers, and wrap up our presentation today with an engaging Q and A session. Now I would like to introduce today's speakers, Scott Vail, Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at Deltek, and Patrick Park, Partner at KPNG UK. Scott, over to you. Thanks, Julia, and thanks to everyone that's taking the time to join us today on the webinar and helping us make every second count. My name is Scott Bales. I'm the Senior Director of Solution Engineering at Deltec for the Replicon solution set and I'm lucky enough to be joined today by Patrick Park, a member at KPMG. Patrick, go ahead and say hi to the group. Yeah, hi, everyone. Let me just give a very quick introduction. So Patti Park, I am a partner here at KPMG in The UK, but purpose of joining the webinar today is I also led our internal transformation program, which was an SAP S4 public cloud professional services solution. But SAP as part of that program recommended we use Replicon, particularly for its zero time and will hopefully bring that to life through the conversation. Excellent. Excellent. Thanks again. Thanks again, Fadi. Now, before we get into the KPMG transformation journey, I want to talk a little bit about the Deltek Replicon solution set what we're providing in a scalable, compliant AI powered time tracking platform for PSA solutions, workforce management and labor compliance. Deltac Replicon actually eliminates errors from time tracking because it can automatically capture and validate that time from your workforce across hundreds and thousands of different applications. We're going hear a little bit about that today. It plays well with your back office systems, sharing data across your CRM and your PM tools. It's ERP agnostic, but we seamlessly integrate with ERP solutions like SAP and SuccessFactors. Deltek Replicon oversees stat legislative changes, so we're monitoring labor changes globally in over 75 countries, and then providing updates on an ongoing basis. I can't forget to mention our market leading capability in producing AI powered timesheets. So without further ado, let's go ahead and step through the journey, Patti, that KPMG went through. Yeah, let me give a little bit of context before we sort of jump into what's on the slide. So we at KPMG, we're running a pretty old version of SAP. And for my purposes, I've been in the firm for fifteen years. And when I say pretty old, it predates my tenure in the firm. So it's that sort of age. And it was a system of record, you know, yes, we used cats from a timesheet perspective, we used SAP to record our financials. And we knew we had to make a change. And I guess the real question we had to ask ourselves was what type of change did we want to make? Did we genuinely want to see it as a significant transformation opportunity? Or did we just want to replace what was a system of record with another system of record? It wasn't a hard choice for us actually, why would you miss the transformation opportunity? And therefore we decided to look at our full value chain from opportunity capture the whole way through to build and close, staffing, time recording, and everything in between. So as part of looking at what that meant for us, we decided that SAP S4 Cloud Professional Services was the right answer. And that solution moved us to being in the cloud. That solution meant we would never have to do one of these big upgrade programs again, but it had deficiencies. So whilst we lived through the sell and plan, the set up and staff, the manage and record and the build and close elements of it, there were bits of the SAP solution that just didn't do what we needed to do. So we went to SAP and said, listen, we've got a staffing set of requirements, which you don't seem to fulfill in your product, who should we use? They recommended a third party product. We have a time recording need, which your standard out of the box solution doesn't do, you know, what do we need to do from that perspective? And they are the ones that recommended RetroCon to us. And why was that recommendation? So, you know, yes, we are in The UK a 20,000 person business, every single person in the business has to do a time record every week. And that's just mandated within our teams. And we were looking at how could we significantly transform the experience to our users of how to do that time record on a daily, if not weekly basis. Step forward, you look at what Replicon Wayfull was going to offer. So you've got a significantly, significantly improved user experience, through desktop, but also through mobile. And that alone was a massive step forward for the people in our business. In fact, we had our sort of 500, 600 senior leaders who probably hadn't done a timesheet for ten, fifteen years. By nature, it was always something that their EAs did for them. We made a decision as part of the program that that would no longer be the case. You know, we were giving them the tools that they should be able to do it themselves and competent in doing it themselves. But why Replicon? So look and feel user experience important to us. The other key benefit of Replicon and why SAP recommended it to us was the zero time functionality. So what do I mean by that? So I said 20,000 people need to do a timesheet every week. Do we really want 20,000 people going into the calendar and figuring out what they were working on, going finding the codes and populating it themselves. Or could we use the tech to actually pre populated it for them? And that's really the panacea and the dream that we decided to chase as part of our transformation. So where are we now? We went live last April. So what's that five months ago? We have had pretty much seamless user experience from day one. And by that, I mean, solution is so self evident and self explanatory that people were able to just adopt their time solution from week one, and it's really probably been the least problematic element of the full end to end value chain you see on screen, that went live. Really, really strong feedback. People kind of look at the UX, people look at the mobile experience, people look at the intelligence that's in the solution and genuinely see a significant improvement to their ways of working. That doesn't mean across the sort of snake on the screen, there are lots of sort of sticking points and pain points. And within the end to end transformation that we went under, there's still room for improvement and room for automation and room for change. But actually timesheets is not one of those. So it's very much a big win for us. Very much happy to kind of answer any questions you have on this, but that's sort of the quick overview of what the transformation journey was. Great, thank you. Thank you, Patty. So let me just kind of bring this one to life for you. So what does it mean specifically for time for us? So when I talked about staffing and SAP recommending another application, they recommended that application top light, which was called Profinder. Profinder for us has two real purposes or usages. You know, it's a resume repository with the skills of every single one of our employees. So if I'm looking to go and staff someone on the job, that's where I go and find the skills, but I also go and find their availability. If available, and if I want to book them to a job, that booking gets updated in Profinder. So if I was booking Scott on a job, his profile would say he is now working on project X for the next two months. So within the system, we know and forecast where we're expecting people to be working. From a bottom left of the screen, SuccessFactors, we also enabled absent management. So if you're booking time away from work, PTO, you put it into SuccessFactors and SuccessFactors automatically sends that booking into both ProFinder, but also into Replica on your timesheet. So it knows when you're off work, when you're not available to work. And frankly, if you're off work, it means you don't look no longer need to do a timesheet because the system has already told the timesheet solution that you are not available. And then you've got the zero time element to it just below the watch on the right hand side. You know, what is that? That is an essence, the AI going and saying, when I look at your profinder booking, when I look at your calendar, when I look at your teams, when I look at your outlook, etcetera, etcetera, I can see this is what you have been doing this week. So just because in my example, Scott was booked to Project X for two months, doesn't mean that he may not be pulled in to do business development on a particular opportunity, or he may have had to do a recruitment interview, or he may have had to do a performance management conversation. And it will actually go and find those tasks within his schedule, and suggest the code that that time should be charged to. So whilst timesheets isn't a massive burden on everyone, it is a weekly activity and being able to simplify it and automate it as much as possible is a key, key win for our transformation. And I guess I looked at it from a, I've used the sort of words 20,000 people before, this is one element of the solution that impacts and affects 20,000 people. There are other elements of the solution that only impact 400 or 500 people. And clearly, they can have a little bit more pain in those areas because it's not impacting the entire workforce. Time is done by everyone, making it seamless, making it easy, making it a significant step forward from what we had before was really a goal of the program. And with this combination of SAP, Replicon and Profinder, we have absolutely fulfilled our kind of vision and goal for the business in this area. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Patty, for all of the context. I love love telling the the KPMG story and and and sharing, you know, not just the the theoretical, but the the the actual ROI on the tool set and delivering on promises made during the sales cycle. So thanks for that background and that context. I'm going leave this slide up because I'm sure it's going to be a significant part of our discussion as I get into some of the questions that I have for you about the transformation. I know it played a large part, that the zero time capability, that tech, as you referred to it, played a large part in differentiating Replicon as an offering for KPMG. Our AI powered timesheets, you'll hear us interchange that functionality with the term zero time, really was our solution to a very specific use case. We call it the high volume use case, users that have to fill in hundreds of entries for a timesheet in a given period. And, you know, we went to design something that was going to make that easier. It was a missing UI and interface across time solutions. We've actually applied it more broadly across knowledge workers and the service industry, and Replicon and this capability really turns the concept of time sheets on its head instead of you telling the system what you worked on for a given week, the system tells you and it's really changing the game and making a huge difference in the market. But let's talk about, you know, how that capability and how it's, you know, underpinning AI architecture is affecting KPMG. And and right away, I want to understand, like, why was this the right time to take this digital transformation journey at KPMG? Why was this the right time? So I guess I mentioned at the outset, we were on a pretty aging application set. We went the only country on that platform historically, other countries had moved off it. So its technical debt was ever increasing. We were at a point where only ourselves and one other geography was still on that solution. So we needed to get off. It's back to therefore, we had choices as to what we did. We could have done less transformational, quicker, cheaper, easier, or as you know, we decided to take the sort of more transformational perspective for us. So kind of time, why is it the right time? We have a strategy within our technology function, which is cloud first that we wanted to move to SaaS based cloud applications. We believed that the SAP public cloud professional services solution had reached a level of capability, critical mass, whatever you want to call it, that meant it was fit for purpose for a business of our size. And we recognized some of the deficiencies in the product still, know, some of which we filled with doing extensions, some of which we filled with using third party applications such as Replicon. But it was kind of a, you know, we didn't have to why was it the right time? It was fundamentally just it had to be done. We were at a point of technical debt where we had to do something, and therefore a clear call to action to make a significant change. We're also a very albeit it kind of feels like we're an amorphous single brand, within our 20,000 people, there's some very different types of businesses. The sort of simple example I give of booking Scott for two months is a sort of typical consulting example where someone in the consulting team would work on the same programme you know, for those two months period, but if I compare that to our tax business, you know, which is very high volume, and, you know, you get the example that Scott referenced, where someone may be working on twenty, thirty, 40 different projects or jobs opportunities within a given week, hence a diverse set of business requirements that we had to look at figuring out how to resolve through the programme. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. You know, with any transformation of this scale, you're going to get a lot of opinions and a lot of end user sentiment, because at the end of the day, this is one of those system changes that affects every single individual in the organization. And what's the sentiment today? I know, I know you said, you know, things are going well, but is there any user sentiment around the process change in the system that you can share? Yeah, mean, if look through the life cycle of the program, lessons learned. There are times when we sort of overexposed the solution to the user base. And, you know, I use the word overexposed quite deliberately there because frankly, we probably showed them too much too early. You know, it wasn't necessarily all working and clearly that creates a sentiment challenge, which we then have to overcome. Reflect on, where are we now, so kind of core SAP, yeah, the kind of the noise or the mood music is, well, it still looks and feels like SAP. I was hoping there would be more AI embedded in it. I was hoping Joule would have driven X, Y and Z forward yet, but it hasn't. That's just a fact of where we are. So there's a little bit of frustrations around just some of the SAP screens, the UX is significantly better, but it's not fully automated yet. And we very much made a conscious decision three to four months before we concluded all our testing, Joule was released, you know, we decided not to turn anything on, because that would disrupt testing, potentially disrupt our go live and therefore we would face into that post go live. So the criticism on that basis is probably very fair, actually. And we've got a whole evolution plan where we're going to turn on those automations, lots of stuff which is currently driven by workflow or sort of some manual forms will vanish overnight when we turn those things on. So people are excited by what they see as the evolutionary roadmap and the change, probably looking at some of the systems today going that's a bit cumbersome and a bit difficult. When I step out of SAP and look at some of the sort of the third party systems about it, Profinder and Replicon, Profinder does what it says on the tin, you manage your resume within it. You don't really have to do anything else, SAP speaks to profiler, goes and books it for you, you're not physically going to in and people yourself. As long as they're in your project plan in SAP, then they get booked. So that's good. Replicon, as I say, on everyone's mobiles use from day one and actually the one area where there has been the least noise just because the UX is good. Right. That's great. That's great. Do have other specific benefits that you can point to and you say, hey, listen, you know, were able to accomplish X as a result and we can see that in numbers? Yeah, I mean, fundamental reality for us, as much as we probably don't like to admit this is historically, we didn't really have a true view of our cost of sale. And, you know, every business development job, maybe client had a BD code, you know, we might have 50 different opportunities within that one client, but everyone's BD just got bundled into the same bucket. So we've no true sense of cost of sale. You know, therefore when we finished the programme, we had no true sense of cost of delivery and cost of sale together, which meant we didn't really understand whether the work was genuinely profitable or not. So that is fundamentally one of the biggest changes and benefits we have got. We now actually understand every single proposition we're selling to market. What is the effectiveness of that proposition and how much does it deliver to our business? In terms of readiness of MI, availability of MI, we also used to very much live in a sort of retrospective view of the business. We now have a live view of the business, and that's incredibly important for forecasting, recruitment capability needs, location needs, etcetera, etcetera. So dynamically changing how we're thinking through some of this stuff. And what we're also seeing is actually a much more accurate record of what people are spending their time on. And, you know, old cats was a pretty difficult user interface. And actually a lot of people just went with, I'll put the entire day to that code because that's the path of least resistance when I'm filling in my time sheets. What we're actually seeing now is the four to five codes that they've worked on in that day. So we're getting a significantly more accurate view of where people are spending their time, how much of their time is actually in the market and chargeable versus unchargeable. You know, the negative to that is we have seen and witnessed a change, you know, initially we were dropping about 10 percentage points in terms of chargeability to the market. We sort of did the usual exploration, is this real? Is this a system problem? Is this a go live issue, etc, etc. But what we very quickly realized was, people were just using one code because it was easier to do. Now we're actually seeing where they're really charging the time to, and making the right changes to focus, practice, people's goals, expectations as a result of that. So, you know, we're still early days. There's no getting away from the fact we're still early days, but we are suddenly looking at a data set, which means, you know, we are able to manage our business better, we're able to forecast better, we are able to predict the future better, all of which were key wins for us. Okay, last question I have is around the role that AI plays in the user experience and why that matters for KPMG. So the role AI plays in the user experience today, not enough would be the very blunt answer. And that is, again, just a product of we went live at a certain time when a lot of the AI tooling was either just new to market or hadn't been embedded long enough. So, yeah, we are absolutely cognizant and upfront that we are very much on a evolution journey here as well. What does that mean? That means we want to turn it on as much as possible. And what we sort of looked at is what comes out of the box from our various vendors versus, you know, what agents do we need to build ourselves? How can we genuinely move at peace in some of these areas? So, if I look at the kind of go forward roadmap, you know, there are whole elements of our solution today, which have manual interaction, manual activity needing to happen to validate, check, ensure something has been done. And that's part of our controls. It's not necessarily an SAP or a replica or a cofinder requirement. It's just part of the controls that we had to build in. Going forward, all of that will be run and managed by AI. So that is critical component. There's lots of forms have to be filled in to get the help desk to do stuff and so on. Again, all of that will vanish with AI. So, you know, I genuinely think AI has significant promise and a significant future. But, you know, if we were honest with ourselves, we didn't really get everything turned on at the outset that we could have, partly because of the sort of sprint to go live, partly because of the readiness of some of the tooling and its genuine confidence in its accuracy and its ability to operate. We are using AI now, we've just turned it on for our entire help desk. So, the internal health function is now managing our user base for us, telling them what their sort of question responses need to be, etcetera, etcetera. So it's going to massively, massively accelerate. As specific to replicon and zero time, you know, our tax business, particularly because of its high volume nature is really looking at how is this going to progress? How is this going to continue to drive accuracy into my weekly statements? Can I trust it's looking at the 100 plus collaboration tools and coming up with the right answer? So, there's a lot of expectation that to some extent I'm having to manage, but actually we want to turn on as much as we can as quickly as possible once we get confidence that it's all there. Yeah, I think cautiously optimistic is something we're hearing from a lot of organizations when it comes to AI. And it sounds like, you know, KPMG recognises its benefit and is doing the same. So thank you for indulging us with your responses to my questions. But for now, I'm going to pass it back to you, Julia, for some Q and A. Thank you, Scott and Patrick. We'll now give everyone a minute to locate the Q and A window on the webinar console to submit your questions for our speakers. While you do so, we wanna remind you that Deltek is in the business of powering project success for project based organizations of all sizes. Today, we are featuring Replicon, which enables professional services organizations to streamline their business with unified time tracking solutions. Be sure to visit our website to learn more about our solutions and request a demo to see how we can help your organization. If you would like to explore how Revicon can help your professional services organization be more efficient by easily tracking project hours and managing your workforce, please select yes on the pop up poll you'll see on your screen, and we will be in touch. We have a few questions that have come from the audience. Scott and Patrick, let's get started. Our first question today is going be, you mentioned how AI is helping to automatically capture time across 100 plus tools. How quickly did employees adopt this new way of working and what feedback have you received from them so far? Yeah, so I mean, as I said, 20,000 people having to within a week shift to using the new tools. And we had that sort of senior cadre of four hundred five hundred that haven't had to do it themselves for at least ten-fifteen years. So we had a bit of resistance in advance, there was no doubt, some people going, you know, do I really have to do this? Why would I have to do this? And we were quite conscious of how to get that adoption quickly and happening quickly. So, one, we got our Xcode together, they all did their timesheets on the app on their mobile. And that was important to show them how easy it was and therefore ensure that there was a clear message from the top, that actually, this is easy, you shouldn't have a problem and we expect you all to get on with this pretty quickly. When I looked through the rest of the population bar one, and I'll come back to that example, everyone actually loved it from day one. You know, I can't overestimate or overstate just how significant a step forward it was from our old system. And therefore having a UX that was easy, that made sense to you, having pre population of stuff, sensible, easy to use. So actually, from day one, it was very positive. And actually the of the win we had is we released the timesheet several weeks before SAP. So people's first experience of the new tooling was a really positive one. And I said, I'd come back to the one and I've told Scott this story before, but, you know, we had one person who just couldn't get over the idea of having to do it themselves. And through our tracking solutions and tools, we could see every Friday afternoon, they would have a Teams call with their EA, they would give control of their screen to their EA, and then they would watch their EA do their timesheet for them on screen. One, I sort of laughed at it because it took longer for them to do that than it would have taken just to actually open the app on the phone and do it themselves. And two, they had no idea we were able to track all of this stuff. So within about two to three weeks of that happening, we sort of made it clear that we were very aware that this was happening. And that behavior stopped dramatically. So, you know, the kind of quick answer would be seamless adoption from week one. You know, that was how easy it was. Integrating with SAP S and ForHana and SuccessFactors is a big milestone. Could you share any lessons learned from that integration and that other organizations might find useful? So I guess, did we do some of these things? So with us, it was elements of the program had CRM, Profinder, SuccessFactors, SAP, Replicon, etcetera. So we didn't do a big bang, we decided to do a set of sequential waves, sequential go lives. And I think that kind of right sizing those was part of the positive lessons learned as to how to make sure the integrations are running effectively, to make sure they're working. So SuccessFactors talking to SAP, SuccessFactors talking to Profinders, SuccessFactors talking to Replicon. So bite sized chunks was kind of key lessons learned, which was useful. Driving some of therefore the behavioral transformation as part of those bite sized chunks was also important. So, you know, absence management and SuccessFactors was released about ten months before S4 itself and timesheets and so on. So people were used to a new process whereby they went into SuccessFactors and booked their absences. If I'm being very honest, they didn't really see any benefit from doing that ten months out, other than it was just a new set of admin they had to do. And the benefit really became obvious when everything else integrated together and everything else was live. So the very first timesheet you did, or didn't do actually is the case because you'd built holiday, you you opened the app, it immediately showed you that you had in SuccessFactors booked that time off. It had automatically done your timesheet for you and therefore, could start to just actually visualize and see in reality what the integration did, the benefits to their workflow and work processes as a result. But, you know, the learnings to us was sized chunks. In doing so, think through what it means to your final cutover. There's definitely no doubt in my mind that we had a few unintended consequences when it came to cutover that we had to work through. That was part of the success was just breaking it down to right solutions, right time, rather than one big bang. We have one more question for today and it will be looking ahead twelve to eighteen months. Where do you see AI having the biggest impact in the workforce transformation beyond time tracking? Yeah. I mean, this is the sort of perennial question we're continually dealing with at the moment. So not just how does it help the delivery of these types of programmes, but how does it actually significantly change what we do day to day in our systems? And I think, you know, what we have done, and it was the right thing for our business was we have made our engagement leaders and engagement managers significantly more accountable for the commercial management of their jobs. We've made them significantly more accountable for their staffing profile, their billing profile, the cost management within their jobs, all for the right reasons. And that was very much part of our transformation vision. If you were to speak to them, you know, what would they say? They would say, well, you've added 25 to 30% of admin to my life. I'm not sure of what the sort of business value to some of that is. And that's because they're not sitting in the finance seat or the leadership seat looking at those reports. So really, the objective and goal for me is, is got to be how do we leverage AI to remove as much of that 25% to 30% of effort from those individuals, be that automatic scheduling of billing, be that commercial planning tooling. So how can we enable them to have a much lighter touch with the actual AI products doing a lot of the work behind the scenes for them. How do we ensure all of the currently manual controls that are in place are replaced by AI? So, you know, the goal is reduce that 25%, 30% of activity for those sort of 400 or 500 individuals, which de facto means that time from their perspective, gets entirely focused back in the market, gets entirely focused back with our clients. And that has got to be a good thing for not just ourselves, but also our clients, the work that we're conducting for them, and really driving automation simplification. And not just sort of the automation bot side, we've got to very much be looking at the agentic side, how do we actually use the intelligence to drive some of this change rather than just seeing it as an efficiency play. And that will wrap our Q and A for today. I just want to take a moment to say thank you to Scott and to Patrick for a wonderful presentation today and give you a moment to say thank you to the audience before we sign off. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate your time. It's been a great Thanks, Rumi, too. Thanks, all. Don't forget, you'll receive the on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. And if you are not able to get your question today, we'll be sure to follow-up with you directly offline. Please check the resources provided in the email you'll receive and view our customer stories for more information about how we're helping firms like yours become more efficient. Also, we appreciate if you shared your feedback and filled out the short survey you'll see at the conclusion of the webinar. With that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today, and please visit delltech.com for more upcoming Deltek events.