Koen Claessens, Partner BDO Advisory

The challenges facing companies today are as diverse as they are numerous. So, if you want to tackle them effectively, you need a wide range of knowledge and expertise. The BDO Advisory team comprises approximately 200 experts, ready to provide you with multidisciplinary support in the areas of technology, organisation, people, risk management and finance.

After more than a year and a half of corona pandemic, economic recovery and sustainable growth are again high on the agenda. Companies can once again focus fully on the future. They want to keep costs under control while being as productive as possible. Moreover, they are searching for an answer to the declining engagement and growing loss of their employees due to the increasing pressure and complexity.

In this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world, the challenges are piling up. Questions that concern business leaders and managers include:

Let’s go back in time for a moment. At the end of 2017, BDO Belgium and IT services provider Crossroad Consulting joined forces to create more expertise in technology, ERP implementation and strategy. The digital power and expertise quickly found its way to customers, but was deployed internally as well to further digitalise our own services, such as Tax and Accounting. Not long after, Peter Van Laer, the manager of Crossroad Consulting, became CEO of BDO Belgium. In this way, we once again highlighted our digital ambitions.

In 2018, BDO Belgium brought the management consultant Ideas@Work on board, adding a great deal of expertise in the areas of ‘Strategy & Transformation’, ‘Operational Excellence’ and ‘Customer Excellence’. Once again, we are putting all of this know-how and experience to work for our customers and for our internal operations – the ‘BDO Way of Working’.

These diverse challenges require a multidisciplinary approach. Suppose you want to increase the efficiency of a division or department. Your first thought may often be automation. However, automation will have little impact if the organisation and processes are not first simplified and standardised. And that change is likely to encounter resistance. That’s why it is important to get your people on board as well, so that they don’t cling to old habits and the traditional way of working. In short, there is a great deal of change management involved.
And that’s not all. New processes and systems bring along new risks. For example, are the new systems sufficiently protected against cybercrime? How do you ensure continuity? Moreover, you also want to measure the results of the automation and the performance of the change. How much more clout has your company or organisation gained? Measuring is knowing – and performance reporting makes this possible. In short, increasing your organisation’s efficiency goes far beyond just automating the process.
Another example: companies that have implemented Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software know that it can often be useful to call on financial experts in addition to IT experts. After all, they understand best how to explain the financial module of the software package to their peers. That’s why our IT experts often work together with colleagues from the regulated professions (Accounting and Tax) when implementing ERP software. And with the security specialists too, in order to ensure that the new ERP system is properly secure to prevent fraud, among other things.
These two examples clearly demonstrate the importance of tackling business challenges in a multidisciplinary manner. The days of silo thinking and working are gone forever. You can no longer get by without cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience. BDO Advisory combines this knowledge in numerous domains:

Today, BDO Advisory counts around 200 seasoned consultants. These IT experts, organisation specialists, financial advisers, forensic researchers, internal auditors, cyber specialists, etc. guide and help roll out projects in companies, public institutions and social profit organisations.

Over 70% of this extensive team have more than 4 years of professional experience, which is fairly unique in the sector. Moreover, they can also call on the help of more than 20,000 ‘Advisory’ experts from BDO’s global network. We operate in 167 countries and share knowledge and best practices in the roll-out of international projects.

Finally, BDO Academy forms an indispensable link in the realisation of a project or change. By training our customers, we make ourselves superfluous in the long term.