TECHNOLOGY
MAKING THE CASE FOR
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION When Jen McDonald took over the reins as Deloitte Africa CFO in 2017, she embarked on a journey to integrate the company’s finance function. But she quickly realised that this couldn’t be done without a digital transformation. Now she finds herself advocating for clients. By Caylynne Fourie
J
en McDonald was appointed as the CFO of Deloitte Africa in 2017 and has been in the role for just over three years. In 2017, Deloitte had recently defined its global and Africa 2020 strategy, as well as its Africa Finance strategy. “The vision statement for finance was ‘to be a world-class finance function’ and the goal I set was to deliver a world-class, relevant service that makes an impact that matters to the organisation’s strategic goals,” Jen says. At the same time, Deloitte had just finalised its Africa integration, which was the merger or combination of 14 practices across Africa into one firm called Deloitte Africa. The integration set the landscape for a finance transformation, as well as a digital transformation journey. However, starting on this journey wasn’t going to be easy. At the time, Deloitte also had completely different and disparate IT systems across the continent, from its ERP and CRM software to expense management and payroll systems. “ For Jen, this meant that the finance and operational transformation for the Africa member firm needed to be underpinned by an ERP and digital transformation. She put her hand up to lead the project.
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Project Moja The Deloitte Africa digital transformation project was called Moja, which means “one” in Swahili. “We wanted to implement a common platform that would set the playing field for the future and help us standardise, integrate, digitalise and automate those end-to-end business processes and move Deloitte Africa forward in operat-
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ing successfully as an integrated firm across Africa,” Jen says. The organisation started by upgrading its existing CRM system in South Africa and deploying it to all the countries across Africa in which it operated. Then, Deloitte Africa implemented a suite of SAP cloud solutions along with BlackLine to support its balance sheet reconciliation process for Africa. In addition, the implementation of SAP Analytics Cloud as a BI visualisation and dashboarding tool, is in progress. Part of this programme was Project Tetris, which was the finance transformation project, as well as a master data strategy project, which helped the company determine how it could manage its master data as a firm from a strategic and operational point of view. “We had a cloud-first strategy and chose public cloud solutions for most of what we laid down in terms of solutions architecture,” Jen explains. “This meant we had to move to a software-as-a-service model within what SAP calls their ‘Intelligent Enterprise’.” Jen points out that what was interesting about Deloitte Africa’s journey was that they were the first organisation to implement the suite of cloud solutions from SAP. “We made a conscious, strategic decision to walk this two-year journey with SAP, knowing that we would be the first and that some of the solutions we were laying down were immature at the beginning of the journey,” Jen says. Deloitte’s consulting practice was the lead implementation partner that also supported a co-innovation of the solution with SAP through the implementation. “This has strategically placed our Deloitte Africa SAP consulting practice as market leaders in the SAP public cloud space.”
