Deloitte New Zealand says discussions are under way over the likely reabsorption of its consulting arm.
The Australian Financial Review reported last week that Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT) would reabsorb its professional services consulting arm globally after seven years of separate operations. A total of 140 jobs were expected to be cut in Australia and New Zealand. The integration, expected to be completed next month, has already reportedly seen 50 staff retrenched and a third of Australia’s 30 Deloitte Consulting partners tipped to depart.
The New Zealand organisation said discussions were in progress but it did not expect “significant” redundancies as the two divisions had complementary skills, according to a spokeswoman. She says the company expects to employ about 90 consultants in New Zealand after the process is complete. A year ago the two divisions employed about 120 consultants split between Auckland and Wellington, though some attrition is likely to have occurred in the interim. Most of the 140 job losses are expected to occur in Australia.
The AFR reports that the managing director of Deloitte Consulting for Australia and New Zealand is returning to the US and that a management restructure will be happening independently on this side of the Tasman.
Last July Deloitte NZ told Computerworld that it had two divisions that advised on IT. DTT dealt with medium-sized companies and specialised in JD Edwards implementations (merged last week with PeopleSoft), while larger customers were referred to Deloitte Consulting. It also partnered with SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and BEA. The company also claimed CRM, networking and communications expertise. IT implementations made up about 20% of the company’s overall New Zealand business, said chief executive Nick Main. The company had an outsourcing group based in Dunedin.
Last September Deloitte Consulting planned to cut staff pay in New Zealand and Australia by an average of 10%, blaming “changes in the management consulting market across the region”.