Results
The extensive work of mapping and assessing the risk universe has helped the company move from ad-hoc analysis to an automated approach using a full population of data. Field auditors now review exceptions with the respective owners and are more prepared for on-site work. Dashboards and visual analysis tools facilitate sharing of analytic results and key findings with stakeholders across the world.
With an automated system in place, auditors now conduct monthly audits globally using 50 tests to identify high-risk transactions, detect duplicates and search for potential fraud. For example, purchase order reviews that were done on a site-by-site basis are now performed globally. Auditors can risk-rank every transaction in the database, flag anomalies and keep history logs of identified items to prevent overlap between annual audits.
The comments feature within IDEAScript provides end-users with process narratives, which explain the function and purpose of each test. Auditors continue their quest to understand the data, increase the sophistication of current scripts and create new scripts. Data analytics has helped the company transition from random to repeatable analysis to improve the identification of high-risk transactions and processes.