Consulting
Our purpose is to help solve our clients’ most complex issues. We deliver strategy and implementation, from a business and technology view, to help clients lead in the markets where they compete. Deloitte Netherlands’ Consulting business is built on four pillars: Purpose, Clients, Talent and Capabilities.
Living our purpose
We worked on appealing and high-impact assignments in 2020/2021, both for the government and in the private sector. Our services in the field of analytics enabled us to contribute to the Future of Health. For example, we are helping a consortium of the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, the Netherlands National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), the Municipal Health Services (GGD), hospitals and community doctors to deliver the strategy to scale up vaccinations.
Helping clients transform their business
The demand for our services continued to increase this year, thanks in part to our broad digitalisation agenda. We saw a further acceleration of large transformational engagements for corporate and public clients. The emergence of cloud services has brought closer connections between business and information technology for our clients. This dovetails well with the types of service we provide, which combine business advisory with technology and human capital services. In this way, we help our clients transform digitally, along all parts of the value chain, and demand in this area is still on the rise.
Engaging our talent
Our people worked hard in 2020/2021, due to the growing demand for our services. With employees mostly working from home, we faced a continuous challenge regarding health and well-being, but we managed to maintain social connections on a team level. An example of our social connection initiatives is the launch of Beat Radio, the radio for Deloitte Consulting, produced by a professional DJ with several consultants from the various teams also taking part. After its successful launch by Consulting, Beat Radio was adopted by Deloitte as a whole during the year. We launched several other initiatives including walks with colleagues, digital check-ins and digital coffees. We also organised two completely virtual Consulting Community Events with more than 1,000 consultants participating.
"With employees mostly working from home, we faced a continuous challenge regarding health and well-being, but we managed to maintain social connections on a team level."
Leveraging our capabilities
Through our integrated delivery model, we work closely with our near- and offshore centres in Romania and India, amongst others. Last year, we saw an increase in clients asking us to support their digital transformations, which leverages many existing and new cloud technologies. Increasingly, we build our teams with people from our own offices and from our near- and offshore centres, and this trend is set to continue.
Scaling up our specialist team
Our continued growth gives us real ‘scale’ – and scale gives us the opportunity to specialise and differentiate, from industry and competencies perspectives. Our partners, directors and managers have both a competence specialisation and an industry focus, so that we can cover all kinds of competencies across all industries. We have the processes in place to keep knowledge and insights up to date.
Enabling transformation through collaboration
In line with our strategy, both our Consulting business and Deloitte as a whole foster a strong culture of collaboration. To properly supervise our clients’ transformations, we need people with expertise in different areas, such as strategy development, change management and technology. Good collaboration between businesses gets the best results for the client. We therefore prioritise collaboration with Risk Advisory, Financial Advisory, and Tax. Strategically, we distinguish ourselves by offering a broad range of linked capabilities to support our clients’ transformations. Indeed, we are increasingly a one-stop shop for facilitating broad digital transformations.
Meeting challenges head on
Recruitment and social engagement were our biggest challenge in 2020/2021, and will remain so in the coming months, even given our new model of working, which prioritises virtual communication. We communicated with our colleagues more frequently than usual this year, in order to be open about all our challenges and share ways of dealing with them. We all learned to work virtually during the year. Our clients confirmed that the quality of our service remains very good and has not suffered from becoming largely remote. The virtual model is highly efficient and made it easier to organise client meetings with experts from all over the world – as well as having a positive impact on our carbon footprint. Our challenge now is to continue our work on increasing our range of virtual learning options, as we believe it is crucial to make this a permanent fixture. This is especially the case because the future working model in Consulting will be an efficient combination of office-, client- and home-based working. Demand for our services continues to increase.
To be able to further grow our Consulting business, we must also grow the number of staff across all levels. Therefore, the successful recruitment and retention of graduate and experienced consultants is a key success factor for future growth.
Embracing technological opportunities
We saw more excellent growth opportunities in digital transformation this year, mainly supported by cloud technologies such as SAP S/4HANA®, Oracle and Salesforce, next to AWS and Google. In addition, we experienced an increase in demand for emerging technologies such as ServiceNow, MuleSoft and Anaplan.
We distinguish between advise, implement and operate. We advise on strategy and implement the right processes and technology for our clients, after which we can run these remotely. Operate is becoming an increasingly important component, and as such we have the opportunity to offer clients integrated transformations, and partner with them from strategy to execution and help running the business.
I’m very proud of what we achieved with our Consulting colleagues for our clients in these challenging times. Not only did we manage to help our clients transform their business or did we help with opening up society in a responsible way post-pandemic, but we also explored new possibilities to keep our talent engaged.
