By Sustainability, Digital Economy and Reporting Team
First introduced in 2023, the Digital Technology Adoption Awards (DTAA) aim to advance MIA’s efforts in advocating digital transformation of the profession. Guided by the MIA Digital Technology Blueprint released in 2018, the DTAA brings together a wide range of stakeholders to recognise exceptional achievements in technology adoption by the accountancy profession across commerce and industry, public practice, and the public sector.
Following the DTAA’s conclusion in May 2024, the DTAA Winners in Action series was introduced to showcase the remarkable success stories of the award winners, with the goal of inspiring others in the profession to embark on their own digital transformation journey. In this edition, we highlight Deloitte Malaysia, the recipient of the Top Excellence Award for firms with over 300 employees in their audit process. Let’s take a deeper look at the strategies and insights behind Deloitte Malaysia’s success, with Edwin Tan, Audit Partner & National Professional Practice Leader.
Why did you adopt technology?
Over the years, Deloitte has invested in various digital technologies, platforms, tools, and capabilities to ensure our auditors are equipped to perform at their best. However, we experienced fragmentation in the variety of our tools and technologies. Auditors were spending time and effort in areas that could benefit from further standardisation/automation. There was also the challenge of ensuring consistency of information available within the engagement team and avoiding duplication. As clients began to embrace a data-driven environment, our auditors also required technologies that could “cut through” the complexity and volume of data available to produce actionable and meaningful information.
What technologies have you adopted?
Deloitte Omnia is our firm’s end-to-end cloud-based audit & assurance platform for large and complex clients. More than just an audit platform, Deloitte Omnia supports our role as auditors in bringing trust and integrity to the capital markets, subsequently protecting public interest.
Deloitte Omnia drives consistent delivery of high-quality audits using intuitive guided risk assessments and embedded analytics which provide our professionals with a more comprehensive understanding of their clients, allowing them to focus on key quality areas that matter most.
Representing a leap forward in our digital transformation journey, Deloitte Omnia enables us to standardise, centralise, digitise, and leverage data throughout the audit process. As a cloud-based solution, Deloitte Omnia features real-time data co-editing capabilities for all our professionals working within working papers without the worry of file conflicts or inaccurate documentation. With data persistency and live integrity checks, our people are assured of the quality of their work. Another benefit of a cloud-based platform is that future generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities can be seamlessly integrated –bringing further benefits to the productivity of our people, and the quality of our work.
Deloitte Omnia further integrates our digital suite of audit and client collaboration tools, like Connect, Digital Confirmation, Asset Count, and Reveal Analytics, resulting in enhanced quality, increased efficiencies, and improved communications and collaboration throughout the audit.
How was your digital technology implementation journey?
Change is the only constant. Nothing has rung truer in today’s fast-paced environment. Yet, it is human nature to resist change and move out of one’s comfort zone. At Deloitte, our efforts to enhance audit quality through innovation and transformation first starts with culture and mindset change – that embracing change is good for our people, our clients, and our stakeholders. We spend significant time and efforts in ensuring our culture of embracing transformation informs every facet of our audit engagements, through strong project management skills, robust risk assessments, and ensuring the Deloitte Way remains central to our audit approach. No amount of digital transformation will succeed unless we ensure the “people element” is on the right path towards success.
Learning to use a new audit platform is never easy. In implementing Deloitte Omnia, we appointed a dedicated Implementation Leader at the Audit Partner level and created a network of Change Agents (or Accelerators) to lead the way. Specific pilots were first selected for onboarding onto Deloitte Omnia, guided by our Accelerators and supported by the firm’s professional practice department and transformation leadership.
Pilot engagement teams were provided with specific training and on-hand assistance in using Deloitte Omnia for the first time. Along the way, key learning points and improvement feedback were collected and shared with future adopters. Today, we are on our journey towards full deployment of Deloitte Omnia across all relevant audit engagements and piloting its use in sustainability assurance and advisory engagements.
What is the impact of your technology adoption?
At Deloitte, our investments in technology adoption – specifically Omnia, which is the audit platform for our large and complex audits – is premised on the imperative that our audits must be of the highest quality to protect public interest and bring value to our stakeholders. The growth in the firm’s results is fuel for our future transformation initiatives and ensures our audit talent has a meaningful career with us. As we adopt technology, we have seen benefits to the firm in lower leverage ratios and partners’ workload when compared to national averages. Our investment in transformation drives our firm’s structure, Audit Quality Indicators and quality delivery – all important focus areas of our stakeholders and regulators.
As a monitoring measurement, we employ an internal ratio named “Benefits Realisation” which measures the “over-time” reduction in audit engagement hours resulting from adopting our technological platforms in delivering a quality audit. The reduction comes mainly from increased data persistency, higher standardisation, intuitive user interface and better auditor-to-client collaboration.
What is your future digital technology plan?
Technologies and AI can help organise and describe data, so auditors can expand the depth and breadth of their capabilities in researching, summarising and connecting volumes of literature and application guidance in a meaningful manner.
We continue to explore how generative AI can augment (not replace) and assist our auditors in strengthening their judgement especially in areas where patterns, trends and environmental risks can inform better risk sensing and refine audit risk assessments.
Do you have any tips to share with the readers?
It’s important to have in mind the outcome and benefit that one seeks out of digital transformation. It’s never a one-size-fit-all, and the level of investment should always commensurate with the expected benefits. In embracing digital technology, always remember the human factor – the technology, applications and platforms are but tools for us, as professionals, to use in the interest of our clients, our people and other stakeholders. Having a culture and mindset of change (and change for the better) is always the most important step in successfully adopting digital transformation.
Why did you participate in the DTAA?
We decided to participate in DTAA to support its goals in encouraging digital transformation among the profession and in supporting the national agenda. It simply was the right thing to do – showcasing the benefits of embracing digital transformation and encouraging others to take up the challenge to do so in their respective organisations.
What is your advice to aspiring participants of the DTAA in the future?
For future participants of the DTAA, don’t fear that your entry isn’t good enough. Every digital technology transformation journey is deserving of participation. Share your success stories, and showcase the benefits you and your organisation have received from digital transformation.
For more information about the DTAA and the complete list of winners, click the links below:
