Deloitte wins innovation award for Illuminate supply chain solution
For the third year running, Deloitte has been recognised for its innovation power, landing the top spot of the AFR’s Most Innovative Companies in the professional services category.
As determined by Australian behavioural science- driven innovation consultancy Inventium, Deloitte’s supply chain tool Illuminate has been named Australia’s top innovation in professional services. For Deloitte, the recognition marks its third podium finish in the Most Innovative Companies list in as many years.
“We are delighted to be recognised for our innovation program and culture,” said Deloitte’s chief strategy officer Clare Harding. “We work hard on experimenting and collaborating with our clients to make an impact. Our innovation program is focused on doing things differently using technology to change the game, (while) our innovative culture encourages all our team members to think differently and experiment.”
Deloitte Illuminate grants greater visibility into complex supply networks with the use of machine learning, allowing organisations to mitigate the risk of disruption and leverage opportunities through automated insights without the need for time-consuming manual interactions with suppliers.
One client’s pilot program was said to have delivered over $17 million in cost optimisation and other benefits. “For many organisations, Illuminate will be the first time they have had the ability to achieve this level of transparency across their supply chain,” explained Jesse Sherwood, who together with Abhi Lekhi led the work on Illuminate.
“This is great recognition for our firm and our team,” said Melbourne-based Sherwood. “It’s a really great example of our approach to innovation. It solves a problem that affects almost all of our clients but one that they’ve never had the tools to solve. This need is only going to grow in importance with the heightened risk to global supply chains presented by Covid-19 and other external events.”
The latest recognition continues a period of success for the firm, with Deloitte being awarded for best overall innovation in 2019 for its intelligent document processing solution Cube, and backing it up a year later with a second-placing in the professional services category – this time for a purpose-built chatbot developed to respond to questions on the impacts of Covid-19 on superannuation funds and balances of Australians.
“Innovation is not a ‘nice to have’ anymore. In our competitive, disrupted world, organisations that can’t or won’t ‘do’ innovation simply can’t keep up,” said Deloitte Australia Head of Innovation, Jason Bender. “Being named number one again in the professional services category is a wonderful acknowledgement of our sustained commitment, creative mind-set and disciplined approach to innovation.”
Other companies that were recognised in the category were: Accenture (for its myBuddy innovation), Aurecon (the Aurecon A-Bridge), LiveHire (LiveHire’s Branded Talent Communities), Bendelta (Design Bank), TSA (Cerebro), Allens (Allens Online Compliance Training), Stantec (Acoustics and Virtual Reality), and Risk 2 Solution (Presilience).
