A listed global automotive manufacturer required a trusted adviser to deliver assurance over their IT controls – leveraging technology to transform a complex, labour- and time-intensive activity.
The company needed to demonstrate that it had robust internal controls in place to meet its Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulatory compliance. Without the right resources or experience in-house, however, it was unable to fully assess and test its internal controls across multiple IT systems in multiple European locations.
Demonstrating compliance of IT controls can be seen as a thankless activity with little prospect to add value beyond meeting compliance requirements. But our client was seeking a fresh perspective and wanted a new provider to modernise its assurance approach.
Our emphasis was on using digital tools and automation to make the compliance process more efficient, and data to create insight on business trends and behaviours beyond what internal controls would detect.
We assessed over 150 controls to determine where automation could be leveraged in the short- to medium-term for the basis of testing compliance. This brought early results and built trust in the new approach and allowed us to broaden our automated testing.
Collaboration kept stakeholders informed and supported knowledge transfer so that the in-house team could maintain the automation as part of business-as-usual activities.
The company can now fully demonstrate testing of its IT controls for SOX compliance. Through the use of data analysis, testing 100% populations, there is greater comfort and deeper insight into potential issues.
Management is able to monitor and interact with the compliance dashboards, created from the data visualisation feature, drilling down into any emerging risks or non-compliant controls.
And automation has added value by enabling more real-time testing and reducing the total hours required to test a control by 30% to 40%.
“We listened and then tailored our approach. Our data experts started the automation journey and embedded the knowledge and skills into the client team so they could maintain it in future years. Our solutions are transparent – we don’t treat analytics as a black box.”
Alex Hunt, Head of Data Analytics, Business Risk Services
Our experienced team of practitioners have many years of senior analytics experience, understand the challenges of working with data, and more importantly how to realise success and valuable insight. We use market-leading tools to change the way analytics and insights are delivered: from visualisations to robotics and machine learning. Combining our people, tools and proven framework, we can meet and exceed your organisation’s data analytics needs.
