Nearly ten years after he forfeited a number of solid career opportunities to help KPMG Consulting build a pioneering practice around the then-fledgling technology known as enterprise resource management, Chuck Burns has returned to the frontier.
This time, he is homesteading alongside another newbie technology cluster, commonly called professional services automation (PSA).
With ERP, companies looked to maximize their returns on equipment and other fixed assets, but "they overlooked the people," says Burns, senior vice president and managing director in KPMG Consulting's Services Industry Practice.
Now, they're learning an important consideration: "It's the people." Says Burns: "Machines are commodities; people are assets."
"Pretty much every major corporation has services" that can benefit from these technologies, says Burns, who estimates that KPMG's PSA practice will grow larger than the practice he built to support the implementation of ERP solutions — a business KPMG boasts of having grown to more than $500 million annually.
According to Burns, it should be no surprise that technologies now supporting human capital management first took root within consulting. "We are a company built around human assets. We have to manage our resources" to positively affect the bottom line, says Burns, who now pegs his career at the intersection of service-chain optimization and human capital management.
After eight years as KPMG's partner-in-charge of SAP Implementation, and two years as managing partner of the firm's Service Chain and Workforce Solutions, Burns is glad to be back guiding companies across a technology frontier.
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