The winds of change, sourced in the back office

Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind (ASOW) began as a joint venture with some powerful momentum behind it. Its two marquee parent companies, Shell New Energies US (Shell) and Électricité de France Renewables North America (EdF), have $430 billion in combined annual revenues and are strongly committed to growing their renewable energy footprint. When ASOW asked KPMG to set up their new finance and procurement systems quickly, they wanted practices that would both meet their own needs and harmonize with existing requirements from their parent companies. Of course, no one could anticipate the impact of COVID-19, including shelter-in-place mandates that kept both ASOW and KPMG project teams working from home during the project’s testing and training stages.

The energy company has established from-scratch, leading finance and procurement functions as part of their operational backbone, enabled by Microsoft Dynamics cloud technology. Benefits include:

• an efficient, lower-cost-of-ownership solution in place, aligned to the business

• finance and procurement policies and practices harmonized to work with the global requirements of parent companies, within their hub-and-spoke holding company structures

• completely remote platform deployment, including typically high-touch stages of testing and staff training, successfully demonstrated in the midst of COVID-19 stay-at-home conditions

• Future of Finance/Procurement innovation modeled for potential adoption by other portfolio companies.

Combining our KPMG Powered Enterprise approach with Microsoft Dynamics cloud technology, we remotely deployed ASOW’s finance platform during COVID-19 conditions and against an ambitious launch schedule without interruption. Now operationally live, the company models how a leading finance function can drive business innovation from the back office. KPMG:

• developed target operating models for ASOW’s finance and procurement organizations using the out-of-the-box functionality of Microsoft Dynamics with selected configuration to meet existing parent-company requirements

• set up the data, processes, systems, policies, and procedures for core finance/procurement functions, including record to report, plan to perform, accounts payable, source to pay, and plan to fulfill

• used the prebuilt components and tested roadmaps of Powered Enterprise to accelerate the implementation of the finance/procurement platform against an ambitious project schedule

• remotely provisioned the entire platform during the go-live stage—including testing and staff training—in the midst of COVID-19 shelter-in-place requirements that kept both KPMG and client project team members working entirely from home.

Clients want advisors with deep understanding of their chosen technology solutions

KPMG drew upon a decades-long, global partnership with Microsoft that includes specialized practice groups for the company’s Azure, Dynamics, and Office 365 cloud platforms; thousands of Microsoft-certified professionals; and hundreds of successful digital collaborations in almost every sector and business function.

Decisive organizations want to move quickly

The KPMG Powered Enterprise approach distills our cumulative experience and insight into prebuilt and tested components that help clients leapfrog generic issues and arrive quickly at their chosen objectives. Related KPMG offers like Powered Evolution help organizations maintain steady-state excellence through ongoing managed services delivery.

Start-ups with global parent entities value global partners

KPMG was able to establish finance and procurement operations with holistic awareness of how they would integrate with complex, worldwide protocols at both parent companies. Clients appreciate our ability to think globally but deliver locally.