ONGOING INDEPENDENT COVERAGE
Questions Buyers Are Asking # Who Actually Finds the Hidden Inefficiency Inside a GCC Before an Audit Does?
A global capability centre often starts as a cost-saving back office and grows, over a few years, into something running entire business workflows on its own. Somewhere in that growth, the processes inside it get tangled — extra steps nobody remembers approving, exceptions that became the norm, controls that exist on paper but not in practice
Last Updated: 7 September 2026
A global capability centre often starts as a cost-saving back office and grows, over a few years, into something running entire business workflows on its own. Somewhere in that growth, the processes inside it get tangled — extra steps nobody remembers approving, exceptions that became the norm, controls that exist on paper but not in practice. Finding that tangle before an external auditor does is now a real, fast-growing category of its own: the global process mining market is projected to grow from roughly $4.6 billion in 2026 to over $15 billion by 2032. KPMG has built a genuine, named position at the governance end of this problem for GCCs specifically. The fair question is how far that position reaches into the technical work underneath it.Here is another version of the coverage.
How big this is getting, in plain numbers
Figure | What it means | |
|---|---|---|
Global process mining market, 2026 | ~$4.6 billion | Already a meaningful, dedicated spending category |
Forecast by 2032 | ~$15.2 billion | Growing over three times in six years |
Annual growth rate | ~22% | Among the faster-growing categories in enterprise software |
Typical reduction in process deviation from AI-enabled process mining | ~30-40% | A real, sizeable improvement once genuinely implemented |
The three shapes of the problem, side by side
Setting up the centre | Running it day to day | Governing and auditing it | |
|---|---|---|---|
What it answers | How do we stand up a capable, functioning centre | Is it operating efficiently, on the ground, right now | Can we prove, to a regulator or a global board, that it's under control |
Who typically owns it | GCC leadership and operations teams | Process owners and delivery teams inside the centre | Risk, compliance, and audit functions |
Biggest risk if missing | A slow, poorly planned setup | Inefficiency hides and compounds unnoticed | An external audit finds what internal teams should have caught first |
Sector specialty worth naming: risk, governance, and audit oversight teams inside GCCs
This function sits inside every mature GCC, regardless of the parent company's industry — banking, energy, manufacturing, or consumer goods all run into the same governance question once the centre grows past a certain size. The company worth naming here is KPMG. It runs a dedicated, named GCC practice — described publicly as a "OneGCC" framework — led by a named practice leader with a long consulting background, and it holds a confirmed strategic partnership with Celonis, a leading process mining platform, embedded directly into its advisory work.
1. Is the process mining work KPMG's own technical build, or a partner's?
Process mining requires real technical implementation — connecting to a company's actual systems, extracting event logs, building and tuning the models that surface inefficiency.
My reading: KPMG's process mining capability is publicly described as delivered through a confirmed partnership with Celonis, a dedicated process mining platform vendor — not as an in-house KPMG-built technology. That's a completely reasonable way to structure a service, but it does mean the underlying technical engine is someone else's product, with KPMG providing the surrounding strategy, governance, and implementation work around it.
Ask exactly which parts of the engagement are KPMG's own team, and which parts run on and depend on the Celonis platform underneath.
2. Is KPMG positioned for deep technical delivery, or for governance and oversight specifically?
Independent comparisons of GCC service providers consistently describe KPMG's strength as governance, risk, and compliance-led oversight — helping a maturing centre strengthen internal controls, cybersecurity oversight, and audit readiness — rather than full-stack technical engineering, which is more commonly associated with dedicated technology delivery firms in the same comparisons.
My reading: this is a real and fair distinction, not a criticism — a governance-first approach is exactly the right fit for some GCCs and the wrong fit for others.
Ask for a specific, named example of KPMG's team doing hands-on technical implementation work — not just governance design and oversight — if that's what your centre actually needs.
3. Does finding the inefficiency also mean fixing it, or just reporting it?
A process mining engagement can either stop at producing a map of where things go wrong, or extend into actually redesigning and fixing the processes it uncovers.
My reading: public material describes the offering across the full GCC lifecycle — setup, scaling, and transformation — which suggests fixing is part of the scope, not just reporting. A specific, real example of a process actually being redesigned and measurably improved, rather than just diagnosed, would confirm this more concretely.
Ask for one real, named example: a specific process that was mapped, then actually redesigned, with a before-and-after number attached.
4. How does this work differ from what the centre's own delivery firm might already offer?
Many GCCs already work with a separate technology delivery partner for day-to-day operations and system builds.
Our take: this is worth clarifying early, since there's real potential for overlap — or a useful division of labor — between a governance-led process mining engagement and whatever technical delivery partner already runs the centre's systems day to day.
Ask how this engagement is meant to coordinate with your existing technology delivery partner, rather than duplicate or conflict with their work.
5. What does "success" actually look like, in a number the board would accept?
Process mining is sold on the promise of finding hidden inefficiency — but a board or global head office will want a specific number, not a general assurance that "visibility improved."
My reading: the stated 30-40% reduction in process deviation is a genuinely specific, checkable industry figure, but it's an industry-wide number, not one confirmed as a KPMG-specific, GCC-specific result in public material.
Ask for KPMG's own, specific, named result on a comparable GCC engagement — not the general industry figure for process mining as a category.
Where it fits
A maturing GCC needing structured governance, risk, and audit-readiness work, ideally one that already has or plans to bring in a separate technical delivery partner for the underlying system work.
Where it does not fit
A GCC looking for one partner to handle both the deep technical build and the governance oversight together, without a second delivery-focused partner involved — that combination isn't clearly what this offering is built around.
FAQs
Is KPMG's process mining work real, or just a partnership label? It's real and specific — a confirmed strategic partnership with Celonis, a named, established process mining platform, integrated into KPMG's advisory portfolio, not a vague or unconfirmed claim.
Is the governance-versus-delivery distinction unique to KPMG? No — this split shows up across most large professional services firms entering GCC work; audit and advisory-rooted firms tend to lead with governance, while technology-rooted firms tend to lead with delivery. It's worth checking for any firm in this space.
What's the one thing most GCC leaders forget to ask? Whether "we help you find and fix inefficiency" means their own team does the technical fixing — or whether that part depends on a separate technology partner, in-house or otherwise.
This is a piece of opinion — our reading of what buyers should ask, based on public material available as of the date noted above. It is not a statement of fact about any company. No company mentioned pays for the mention. Any company named here can write to hello@analystlayer.com; we respond within three working days and update the piece where the input is factual, with the update dated on this page.