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Business valuations
We offer expert valuation advice in transactions, regulatory and administrative matters, and matters subject to dispute – valuing businesses, shares and intangible assets in a wide range of industries.
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Capital markets
You need corporate finance specialists experienced in international capital markets on your side if you’re buying or selling financial securities.
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Complex and international services
Our experience of multi-jurisdictional insolvencies coupled with our international reputation allows us to deliver the best possible outcome for all stakeholders.
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Corporate insolvency
Our corporate investigation and recovery teams can help you manage insolvency situations and facilitate the best outcome.
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Debt advisory
An optimal funding structure for your organisation presents unprecedented opportunities, but achieving this can be difficult without a trusted advisor.
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Independent business review
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Raising finance
Raising finance - funders value partners who can deliver a robust financial model, a sound business strategy and rigorous planning. We can guide you through the challenges that these transactions can pose and help you build a foundation for long term success once the deal is done.
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Relationship property services
Grant Thornton offers high quality independent advice on the many financial issues associated with relationship property from considering an individual financial issue to all aspects of a complex settlement.
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Restructuring and turnaround
Grant Thornton’s restructuring and turnaround service capabilities include cash flow, liquidity management and forecasting; crisis and interim management; financial advisory services to companies and parties in transition and distress
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Transaction advisory
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Virtual asset advisory
Helping you navigate the world of virtual currencies and decentralised financial systems.
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Corporate tax
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Employment tax
Grant Thornton’s advisers can help you with PAYE (payroll tax), Kiwisaver, fringe benefits tax (FBT), student loans, global mobility services, international tax
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Global mobility services
Our team can help expatriates and their employers deal with tax and employment matters both in New Zealand and overseas. With the correct planning advice, employee allowances and benefits may be structured to avoid double taxation and achieve tax savings.
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GST
GST has the potential to become a minefield and can be expensive when it goes wrong. Our technical knowledge can help you minimise the negative impact of GST
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International tax
International tax rules are undergoing their biggest change in a generation. Tax authorities around the world are increasingly vigilant, especially when it comes to global operations.
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Research and Development
R&D tax incentives are often underused and misunderstood – is your business maximising opportunities for making claims?
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Tax compliance
Our advisers help clients manage the critical issue of compliance across accountancy regulations, corporation law and tax. We also offer business and wealth advisory services, which means we can provide a seamless and tax-effective offering to our clients.
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Tax governance
Mitigate tax risks and implement best practice governance that will stand up to IRD scrutiny and audits.
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Transfer pricing
Tax authorities are demanding transparency in international arrangements. We businesses comply with regulations and use transfer pricing as a strategic planning tool.
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Audit methodology
Our five step audit methodology offers a high quality service wherever you are in the world and includes planning, risk assessment, testing internal controls, substantive testing, and concluding and reporting
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Audit technology
We apply our audit methodology with an integrated set of software tools known as the Voyager suite. Our technology has been developed to produce quality audits that are effective and efficient.
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Financial reporting advisory
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Business architecture
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Cloud services
Leverage the cloud to keep your data safe, operate more efficiently, reduce costs and create a better experience for your employees and clients.
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Internal audit
Our internal audits deliver independent assurance over key controls within your riskiest processes, proving what works and what doesn’t and recommending improvements.
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IT advisory
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IT privacy and security
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Payroll assurance
Our specialist payroll assurance team can conduct a review of your payroll system configuration and processes, and then help you and your team to implement any necessary recalculations.
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PCI DSS
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Process improvement
As your organisation grows in size and complexity, processes that were once enabling often become cumbersome and inefficient. To maintain growth, your business must remain flexible, agile and profitable
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Procurement/supply chain
Procurement and supply chain inputs will often dominate your balance sheet and constantly evolve for organisations to remain competitive and meet changing customer requirements
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Project assurance
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Risk management
We understand that growing companies need to establish robust internal controls, and use information technology to effectively mitigate risk.
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Robotic process automation (RPA)
RPA is emerging as the most sophisticated form of automation used to help businesses become more agile and remain competitive in the face of today’s ongoing digital disruption.
The traditional procurement process is a tried and true one. We see it in government and in industry and across projects, services, and goods. For many years, it has been fairly mechanical: put out an RFP, make sure the proposals tick all the boxes, then pick the vendor in the middle, or the one with the lowest price, or the one you wanted to begin with.
That system has been producing steady results for a long time – although “results” usually means making each supplier grind down prices by a tiny fraction. The price is reasonable, the boxes are ticked … and then it’s on to the next job.
Unfortunately, this type of procurement process is on its last legs. There are two reasons. First, the easy gains have already been achieved. You can only shave off prices so many times before suppliers’ margins no longer justify the time and effort required to achieve them.
Second, many commentators, including me, have warned that this type of procurement is likely to be automated out of existence – and soon; there’s no reason why the boxes can’t be ticked by a bot.
Hopefully, that will leave procurement professionals with extra time to focus on more important parts of the process, which incidentally, doesn’t include the sourcing part of procurement. It may come as a surprise to some, but this is arguably the least important aspect. Sourcing is the middle stage of three: the first is planning and the third is managing. These are the steps with the most potential to add enormous value to an organisation.
Governments and shareholders are always asking their organisations to deliver more with less – to reach higher levels of innovation and to get to market quicker. These achievements aren’t always possible, but when they are, a strong procurement capability can be one of the keys to success.
The government’s latest procurement statistics are a mixed bag of good news and bad. The good news is that procurement is improving overall after many years of sustained effort across the public sector, and this should be commended. The bad news lies within three themes that jumped out at me from the data:
- Suppliers and agencies don’t talk enough
- When they do talk, agencies don’t ask for improvements and suppliers’ ideas are usually ignored
- The competencies required to maximise value across the procurement cycle are slipping; too few people have a thorough understanding of how to get the most out of the process
1. Suppliers and agencies don’t talk enough
Only 49 percent of government suppliers have regular contract review meetings – this figure jumps to 69 percent in the services sector. How can you manage your performance or gauge what is desired if it’s not discussed? The following graphs tell the story.
Source: New Zealand Government Procurement Business Survey 2018
Source: New Zealand Government Procurement Business Survey 2018: Community service providers
2. Agencies don’t ask for improvements
How often do agencies ask for improvements? The following table shows that there’s only a small percentage in the “sometimes”, “often”, and “always” categories. It means that 60–80 percent of suppliers aren’t being asked about improvements. If that’s an accurate inference, a massive opportunity is being missed.
Similarly, the data indicates that 70–90 percent of the time, supplier ideas are not adopted. What might this mean? Are suppliers’ ideas really that bad? If so, they’re the wrong supplier. In our experience, it’s more likely that the ideas might be solid, but there are no mechanisms to capture them. It’s also possible that principals have limited time or perhaps have a low appetite for analysing and considering the ideas.
Without these preliminary steps, agencies can’t implement suggestions from the experts they’re engaging to add value.
Source: New Zealand Government Procurement Business Survey 2018: Community service providers
Source: New Zealand Government Procurement Business Survey 2018: Community service providers
3. The competencies are slipping
We know the critical competencies to capture new forms of value or to receive and nurture a good supplier idea: openness to innovation, quality decision making, and finding ways to incentivise performance. Yet these are the three weakest of the six competencies in both surveys.
Source: New Zealand Government Procurement Business Survey 2018
Source: New Zealand Government Procurement Business Survey 2018: Community service providers
We often see clauses that indicate a willingness to receive innovative ideas during the term of the contract, but organisations have no defined process to capture and manage them. It might be written in a contract, but when it comes down to it, it’s all about who has the control and how suppliers are being measured – the box ticking stifles innovation. We’ve seen commercial acumen and bright ideas fail because of the constraints of the procedures, policies, or even the organisation itself.
What needs to change?
There’s good news – there are some relatively easy fixes for all three of these challenges. The public-sector clients that we have been working with over the last few years have recognised a gap in procurement process competency, and many are working to leverage what is often referred to as the “commercial” capability of the team. Sometimes it’s a new hire; sometimes it’s tapping into existing personnel with more training (although both approaches have their limits). Making sure the procurement team asks the right questions and listens to ideas should be relatively simple with the right methodology.
A pragmatic approach works best:
- Grab what commercial expertise you can from within. Aim for an open-minded team that represents the diversity of the business; diversity and openness encourage innovation
- Add some external expertise to your team – you need strong methodologies to achieve more innovation in supplier partnerships. You also need to know what a smart contract really looks like (here’s a hint: quite unlike many of the ones we see)
- Put in place the right leadership. Yes, this will include the right governance, but it’s more than that. Standardisation and support for change management are as critical as knowing who owns the initiative. Creating the right environment is essential: the best environment is a collaborative culture coupled with the ability to resolve differences of opinion and reach an effective decision. This is usually not in the project management manual
There will always be boxes to tick, and no agency can overlook the mechanical aspects of the procurement process, whether you’re buying toilet paper or nuclear reactors. You can’t throw out the rule book. But neither should the rule book extinguish the sparks of good ideas that can drive better results for all stakeholders.
