Consulting Magazine - April 2020

Consulting® APRIL 2020 19
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Like a lot of our Women Leaders in Technology re- cipients, Joanne Heng got into consulting somewhat
accidentally. She was a business
major in college and needed an
internship and a global manufac-
turing company was looking for
an intern to write training mate-
rial for their SAP implementation.
“When I graduated, the demand
for someone with SAP skills was
sky high,” Heng says. “And I’ve
never looked back.”
Fast forward to today and Joanne
Heng is a Managing Director in
KPMG’s Deal Advisory group and
has extensive experience working
on organizational transformation
and strategic technology initiatives
across a number of industries, in-
cluding media and entertainment,
automotive, manufacturing and
life sciences.

She focuses on leading M&AIT across the deal lifecycle fromdiligence to integration and separation services and understandsalignment to business strategy.She is a member of the Integration& Separation team specializingin Technology-enabled projectsincluding M&A IT diligence, integration and separation and ITstrategy & transformation.

“There was a paucity of women
in technology when I started, and
I specialized in automotive manu-
facturing which is equally short of
women,” she says. “Fortunately,
I’ve had great mentors and clients
over the years and that experience
has instilled a significant desire to
continue to increase diversity in
these industries.”
Heng has had extensive experi-
ence in leading global ERP imple-
mentations, business integration,
process design and IT strategy ini-
tiatives in support of business value
creation and realization.

“Consulting, even technology
consulting, is ultimately a people
business,” she says. “Whether it’s
helping our people become suc-
cessful, providing value to clients
or making my executives look
good at the end of the day, it’s the
people I work with that makes this
the best job in the world.”
She has led the design and imple-
mentation of multiple SAP financial
and management accounting solu-
tions within the enterprise includ-
ing global reporting and consolida-
tion, margin improvement and front
and back-office integration.

Specifically, she has deep expe-
rience in planning and managing
IT, business transformation and
integration projects from inception
through planning, deployment and
continuous improvement.

“I have been working with the
same team for over 12 years and
this group of highly talented folks
are still working with me and are
well on their way to becoming fu-
ture partners in the firm,” Heng
says. “Personal success is wonder-
ful, but seeing our team achieve the
success I knew we were capable of
is priceless.”
Ask her the best advice she’s
ever received and she says that
someone once told her that: “This
business is a marathon, a long play,
not a sprint and your decisions and
choices should reflect that.”
And when it comes to winning
the Women Leaders in Technology
award, Heng says she’s “honored
to represent KPMG and humbled
to counted among so many amaz-
ing women in technology.”