Innovation Audit for

Ernst & Young in

Consulting

April 2022

Ernst & Young

Authored by: Mouazzam Jawed

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Table of Information
Section Roll No the Student Name of the Student Title of the industry

B EPGP-13B-057 Mouazzam Jawed Consulting

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Background of Ernst & Young
Ernst & Young (EY) is one of the oldest professional services firms in the world. EY
came into being by merging two organizations namely Ernst & Whinney and Arthur
Young & Co in 1989. The oldest component of the merger was founded in 1849 making

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it one of earliest consulting organization in the world. The firm has offices in more than
150 countries and has divided its global operations into three geographic clusters a)
EMEIA (Europe, Middle East, India and Africa), Americas and Asia Pac. It clocked more
than USD 40 billion revenue in 2021 and employed well over 300,000 employees
across globe.
EY has divided its service offerings into four major buckets a) Assurance – which
includes financial/non-financial audits, Forensics, and Climate Change & Sustainability
Services b) Tax – which includes local tax compliance services, international taxation,
global trade, indirect and direct taxes etc. c) Consulting – which includes technology
and business consulting d) Strategy & Transactions – which has capital transformation
services, business valuation and economics etc.

It is very commonplace to assume that organizations like EY (or Big Fours or MBBs of
the world) focus more on service delivery rather than innovation, but it is not even
remotely true. In fact these organizations are first in the world to try out some of the
emerging technology.

Introduction to Technological
Innovation in Consulting
A consulting organization can embrace technology in two ways
a) By using technology and innovation in the business operations: An organization
can use technology to reduce inefficiencies in its business operations and how it
renders its services to its clients.
b) By embedding innovation in the service offering: By offering innovation as a
service to its clients. For example, organizations are now offering digital
transformation services to companies who do not have core competency in
digitalization

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Technological Innovation Within EY
EY has embedded technology in almost all facets of its business. Be it delivery to the
client or running business operations in its offices. We will focus on both the aspect
one by one to understand EY’s maturity.

a) Innovation in Assurance: Audit is a service which is requires a lot of manual

intervention and readings of report by humans to identify any discrepancy in the
financial report submitted by the company. Historically, audit used to happen
using pen and paper and auditors would then manually type the report and then
submit it to the companies. This landscape has changed a lot over the last
decade. The company has developed state of the art tool to carry out audit of
financial statements and automatically create the report on the go. It involves
these technologies.
a. Artificial Intelligence: EY has created and AI engine which takes in
paper/digital financial report and scans through it and prepares the data
in a presentable manner. It is further configured to highlight high level
discrepancy for the auditors to look into.
b. Web based collaboration tool: The assurance team has created a web
based to tool to gather information by the auditors in real time and
utilizes cloud technology to allow its auditors to work in tandem and in
real-time.
c. Robotic Process Automation: The assurance team uses RPA to automate
some of the mundane repetitive process like creating workpapers and
submission within the web tool.
By employing some of the state of art technologies, EY has completely
transformed itself and also improved its customer experience at the same time
reducing their cost.
b) Innovation in Tax: Just like Assurance line of service, EY has worked a lot on its
Tax tools and has created a robust digital organization to tackle some of the
most complicated tax needs at the global level. So much so that Tax partners
have gone ahead and created a large team of technology experts (more than
1000) to work specifically on the tax tool and technologies. Tax teams primary
focus is to create SaaS (Software as a Service) solution that can be used by its
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 clients without handholding from EY. Back in the days, a tax consultant would sit
at the client office and help them with their taxation matter. But now, with the
help of technology (cloud and web), EY has created solutions that can be easily
used by clients saving a lot of money and time for them. This SaaS solution has
been built using AI, Web and other cutting-edge technologies. 1
c) Innovation in Consulting: EY has created Advisory engine to help client expedite
the problem solving. Apart from the human knowledge repository in the form of
consultants, EY has created a tool using Big Data, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence
that provides high level Advisory services. It uses the previous internal case
studies of the past client cases and learns and then proposes solutions. Apart
from this, the consulting team focuses heavily on Business Analytiics. It has suite
of application that it sells as SaaS solution to its client. It helps EY’s clients to
quickly visualize their enterprise data and take decision efficiently on their own.
d) Innovation With Business Operations: EY has invested heavily on tools and
technologies for its employees to collaborate and deliver services in efficient
manner. During the pandemic, its operations was hardly hit due to agile
technological implementation in the organization. It uses Microsoft’s suite of
office tools like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Cloud, Yammer etc. It uses SAP
modules for its finance, marketing and human resource management. It is also
using some emerging technologies like AI enabled chatbots to quickly resolves
issues of its employees making sure that they are focusing most on the client
deliveries.

Innovation as a Service Offering

Ernst & Young has realized that global organizations will sustain only if they are
investing in technologies of tomorrow. This has prompted EY to incorporate innovation
and emerging technology in almost all of their consulting services. Within their
consulting arm EY has created a competency name Digital and Emerging Technology
(DET) that caters to the need of innovation of EY clients. The team is also responsible
for guiding other competencies on how to create a layer of innovation. The efforts that

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https://www.ey.com/en_in/tax/technology-data#:~:text=Withholding%20tax%20payable%20solution%20%2D
%20EY,verify%20'specified%20person'%20status. EY Tax Technology Offerings
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have gone into innovation has made EY as a market leader in innovation. Some notable
examples that we can highlight here is
a) EY has been named as top blockchain service provider2
b) EY is top ranked in life sciences service provider3
c) EY is a global leader in IoT services4
d) EY is No 1 in RPA (Robotic Process Automation5

EY has invested heavily in building its capability in the emerging technology area by
either hiring or training its staff and developing solution that can be sold its customer
as product. We will look at some of the emerging technology offerings of Ernst &
Young in detail.

1. Blockchain: EY is a market leader in blockchain consulting/services. Even though

traditionally Big Fours have focused only on advisory services, they realized in
early 2000s that in order to survive in long run they will have to create
technology solution. That is what EY has been doing. They have created bunch of
blockchain solution under the umbrella BEC (Blockchain dot EY dot com
blockchain.ey.com) which is typically sold as pay per transaction model. They
have gone one step ahead and solved the most important issue of blockchain
world which was writing smart contract codes by providing a very easy user
interface to create the smart contracts by mere clicks. 6
2. Artificial Intelligence: In AI filed EY provides services like design, architecture,
system integration, data and strategy. Just like blockchain EY has created a
platform or product called EYSpace. It is a AI and automation platform that helps
organizations rapidly adopt AI in various business operations and functions. This
has put EY in pole position in RPA services by Forrester7.
3. Internet of Things (IoT): In IoT field, EY offers the following services enabled by
IoT; a) Manufacturing and operations improvement b) predictive maintenance
suites of application by collecting data using IoT devices c) event monitoring
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https://www.ey.com/en_gl/news/2020/07/ey-announces-that-it-has-been-named-as-a-top-enterprise-blockchain-
service-provider-in-annual-hfs-research-report
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https://www.ey.com/en_gl/news/2022/01/ey-ranked-no-1-life-sciences-service-provider-by-hfs-research
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https://www.ey.com/en_eg/news/2019/12/ey-ranked-as-a-leader-in-providing-internet-of-things-by-hfs-res
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https://www.ey.com/en_gl/news/2018/11/ey-ranked-one-in-robotic-process-automation-services-by-h-f-s-research
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https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-ey-is-redefining-the-blockchain-experience-for-enterprises/
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https://reprints.forrester.com/#/assets/2/1485/RES146255/reports
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 using IoT in industrial fields and mission critical operation. It has also created a
platform called Smart Factory8 which can be picked and deployed on the go. The
solution includes predictive data analytics and virtual reality.
4. Artificial Intelligence/Virtual Reality: EY has a team of consultants across its
global offices who are working on AR/VR solution. The primary focus is on
creating a solution of its retail clients by creating a plug and play solution. It is in
process of creating a platform which can be used by retail companies to allow its
customers to feel the product. EY is seeing most of the traction in the
automobile industry where a customer likes to sense the experience before they
buy a product.
5. Big data and analytics: Organizations are generating data at a rapid pace. But
more often than not they find it difficult to extract meaningful data and take
business decision on it. EY understand this issue and also the market potential as
data is the new oil as they say it. Like other emerging technology field of play, EY
has created multiple solutions that can be deployed by their clients. Those
products are a) Data analytics and reporting b) Cognitive Cyber Centre
Connected capital technologies etc.

The content above covers the innovation specifically in technology domain, but EY has
come up with innovation in its Business Consulting arm as well. For example the focus
currently is on Ecosystem businesses and is trying to create solution catering the
distributed nature of an ecosystem.

Conclusion
EY is truly an organization that thrives on innovation in almost all of it line of services.
It has positioned itself as a firm that is serious about technological advancement in
business operations as well as offered services. EY is very serious about emerging
technologies and bets heavily on some of the obscure looking technologies that have
turned out to be a major disruptor. EY is on path of becoming market leader in almost
all areas.

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https://www.ey.com/en_in/consulting/smart-factory
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