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KPMG to focus on IT consultancy in India

KPMG India Operations CEO Sridar Iyengar has said that this expansion of non-core activities would enable overall operations, including the core audit and tax practice of the professional services group to grow between 50 and 60 per cent this year.

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Growing out of its traditional management consulting profile, KPMG Peat Marwick has acquired expertise in technology consulting areas like enterprise resource planning, e-commerce, information risk assessment and management, supply chain management, within the vertical sectors of banking and finance, manufacturing, communications and infrastructure.

Stressing that IT consulting would be a critical and emerging practice for KPMG in India, Iyengar pointed out: "Our strategic plan is to become really big in IT consulting.''

He added that ERP implementation alone no longer delivered the desired competitive edge for an organisation. "ERP is now viewed only as a component of an end-to-end business solution. In an era of rapid changes in technology, the challenge before IT consultants like us is to constantly reposition our value proposition to the client.

In developed markets, companies are already looking beyond ERP for business re-engineering solutions.

"The market has moved on to areas like enterprise-wide supply chain management and customer relationship management to enable better efficiencies over larger scales in the business processes within organisations,'' Iyengar has been quoted as saying.

The pace of IT adoption within the country has been quite lacklustre and haphazard and most companies do not even have standardised business practices, let alone "best practices'' advocated by management consultants.

The KPMG chief feels there are two broad ways in which Indian companies could adopt ERP solutions.

"You can begin by building your own practices and then customise the ERP solution over all of them. This takes a lot of time. On the other hand, you can identify mission-critical processes within your organisation and modify only those in line with the 'best practice' provided by the ERP package. The rest can be left as they are since they do not directly affect critical business functions,'' he said.

While pointing out that even small companies with tremendous potential growth can approach any major IT consulting firm for their ERP implementation, Iyengar added that the firm's ERP consulting services are more suited to companies with a turnover of over Rs 1 billion.

Within these companies, "the most critical issue in ERP implementations is change management. No IT solution can be placed in a company without changing mindsets. You've got to spend a lot of time on those people who are being impacted on account of such an implementation, including the top-level management,'' Iyengar said.

He added that, apart from their traditional audit, accounting and tax practices, KPMG India sees business process design, performance improvements and ERP as strong growth areas in the short term.

The firm is also investing in building up significant expertise in strategic areas like supply chain management, customer relationship management and information risk management besides technology management.

These will potentially become growth areas in the years to come.

Iyengar outlined, in particular, the firm's commitment to emerging opportunities in new areas like e-commerce and infrastructure consulting. He pointed out that though KPMG had not invested much resources into these areas, India operations is keenly tracking developments in these sectors to be ready as and when opportunities arise.

In fact, he said, a survey conducted by the firm on e-commerce showed that the full potential of the technology has not yet been realised. "All big companies will eventually need to have an e-commerce front-end. In days to come, a situation may arise where cash will have to be re-defined with more people preferring to carry electronic cash as is being witnessed currently in developed markets.''

- Compiled from the Indian media

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