Greater quality growth

The first pillar in our four year strategy is to achieve Greater Quality Growth throughout our business. Our plan is two fold: digitilise our business and leverage on technology to be more efficient; and grow non-audit services across all Line of Services.

1. Create efficiency and agility internally by digitilising our business

Digitilising our business
Getting people tech ready

Globally, PwC has embarked on a journey to create the capabilities we need to work as ‘One PwC’ and make it easier to work with each other and our clients. This will be achieved by aligning and standardising our business operations processes and technologies, across the 158 territories in the PwC network.

PwC's Business Operations Solutions Programme (BOS) will enable us to change how we support our people and work together through these cloud solutions : Salesforce, Workday, G Suite and Business Process Alignment.

The outcomes we want from this change are:

An improvement to our people and client experience. Our people and clients want to have access to the best thinking and tools to be more effective, mobile and agile.

The ability to operate faster in an increasingly globalised world. Both our clients and our people expect PwC to operate seamlessly with one another and without borders.

A transformation of our digital capabilities. Process and technology standardisation will allow us to be ready for change and adapt to any innovation or disruption that comes our way.

PwC Malaysia aims to deploy G Suite and Workday in 2018. We are currently implementing significant ground work for go-live in the second half of 2018. The other BOS components will be implemented at a later stage in Malaysia.

Apart from efforts to digitilise our business, we have also made an investment network-wide to establish a secure environment given increasing cyber threats around the world.

As we implement systems and technology to help us be interconnected, our people in Malaysia also have to adapt and change the way they work :

Part of the BOS programme will require our people to be re-skilled through training so that they will be able to use data and reports from the system effectively.

In April 2017, we launched a new global platform for our client facing teams, TalentLink, which gives us real-time visibility into our people’s experiences, skills, capabilities and interests. It has equipped us to quickly find the right people with the right skills for the right client engagements locally and globally. For our people, they can spot the right opportunities, allowing them to develop their skills and their personal brand.

We started using marketing automation in June 2017 to deliver targeted and relevant content to our clients and potential clients through various channels. It has helped us respond to requests quickly, target the right clients and provide the insights they need or link them to the right subject matter experts in our firm. Marketing automation has enabled us to measure our reach and automate repetitive functions.

In July 2017, we launched Snapshot, a web-based performance appraisal tool in Malaysia. It’s user friendly, accessible and enables regular feedback. This is a step forward from filling in lengthy performance appraisal forms once a year between reviewer and reviewee. Career coaches¹ are provided with a bird's eye view of how their coachees are doing.

In December 2017, we launched flexPoints, a real-time recognition programme for our people. It runs on both mobile app and website, allowing our people to express appreciation for and/or recognise the contributions of their colleagues.

¹ Our people are allocated a Career Coach individually. The Career Coach will discuss with coachees about their development opportunities for the year ahead and how to improve on areas for growth. This includes on-the-job learning and relevant internal and external training programmes.

2. Grow our non-audit services across all Lines of Services

We offered several new services in 2017 in response to changes in the marketplace contributed by global megatrends such as digitisation. Explore the tabs below for more info.

Rising cybersecurity threats continue to disrupt the operations of many organisations. As cyberattacks become the ‘new normal’, companies will need to look at more effective ways to address these risks in order to stay “cyber resilient”. The rapid adoption of emerging technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in business has also seen companies recognising the need for a cyber risk management programme that is future proof - targeting threats from the increased adoption of these technologies.

Our cybersecurity professionals have assisted many of our clients to conduct a wide range of technical and non-technical assessments aimed at understanding the security posture of the organisation and formulating effective strategies to strengthen the organisation’s resilience towards cyberattacks. “Stress-testing” as a cybersecurity defence, using threat intelligence and scenario-based testing garnered the interest of financial institutions amidst growing threats in the market and increased regulatory demand. We are currently conducting these activities on a regular basis using the talents of our in-house certified ethical hackers.

Industries are starting to realise the need for a proper cyber response strategy championed by key decision makers of the company. They recognise that cybersecurity is not merely an IT issue.

Over the years, we have successfully helped many of our clients, including government agencies to develop, improve and test their cyber response plan through a series of cyber war games. This includes raising awareness of cybersecurity at the senior management level using our in-house interactive experiential learning platform – Game of Threats™

Our journey to data analytics is propelled by both internal and external forces.

Internally, we have more transactions, dependencies on technology, and the need to safeguard data integrity and increase the speed of delivery in order to stay competitive. The market also expects us to innovate the way we audit with an increased focus on business insights, and digitalising Governance, Risk and Control (GRC) through data technology and exception based reporting.

Our commitment and target for data analytics is to see lower cost on recurring jobs, more automation and reusability, empowering our people and transforming the assurance business.

Example of how data analytics have been used for clients:

Flight price analytics: Mining live unstructured data from websites and transforming it into charts to provide live comparison of flight prices. This helped our client to analyse flight prices to better plan routes and pricing.

Hospital orders and invoice analysis: Analysing doctor's orders and patient invoices to identify unusual trends or usage patterns.

“Analytics is very insightful and visually appealing. It helps us discover things we may not be able to discover using conventional approaches."

Audit client

“PwC provided valuable insights to the Audit Committee. I would like to do the same for other organisations where I sit as board member.”

Audit client

Organisations globally continuously struggle to manage costs and achieve balanced growth. The conventional way of managing escalating costs is to outsource back office processes to lower cost locations.

As labour costs continue to increase, traditional solutions like shared services can only do so much.

Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions such as robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as a strategic way for businesses to manage their costs effectively. RPA is a software that works across multiple systems and applications, running rules-based repetitive tasks much faster, cheaper and more accurately than a human can.

Using this technology, we have started offering solutions to help our clients to implement a digital workforce. PwC’s Intelligent Automation approach looks at an organisation holistically. The foundations of our approach lie in configuring, testing and deploying bots. Our work involves:

Developing a strategy and roadmap for automation to help our clients in their journey towards automation.
Identifying the most appropriate RPA and other AI solutions, that can translate into efficiency and cost savings for the client.
Equipping our clients with the capabilities to manage a digital workforce.
Designing processes and oversight to create a cohesive human-digital workforce.
Helping our clients to communicate and manage change in their journey to adopt AI.

50% of Asia Pacific CEOs say they would implement cost reduction activities to drive improvements in growth and profitability in the next 12 months.

PwC’s 2017 Global CEO Survey

Given the recent regulatory activities affecting tax, it has become increasingly complex to conduct business. To stay relevant and sustainable, tax functions need to look into automating repetitive and voluminous manual tasks that are time-consuming and error-prone.

This frees up existing resources for more value-adding activities that use data to plan and evaluate key tax and finance performance indicators.

We have established dedicated eTax and Tax Reporting and Strategy (TRS) teams to develop tax technology and transformation strategies for our clients.

Some of the solutions that we have successfully implemented over the past year include :

Country-by-Country (CbC) Datahub to generate submission-ready CbC reports
CTax to simplify tax compliance processes
Data visualisation tools to help analyse and interpret available data for tax planning purposes.

In these times of economic uncertainty and reduced access to credit, companies would do well to extract cash from their working capital to achieve stronger cash flow, higher revenue growth and better profit margins. This is clearly a competitive advantage, helping them to be more sustainable in the long run.

PwC's Working Capital Management team was set up in 2017 to help clients release working capital and increase liquidity that can be used for strategic investments or the reduction of debt. We help our clients improve their processes and reduce the cost of capital, which translates into enhanced profitability.