Telecom Provider Turns Two Days of Work into 20 Minutes with CaseWare IDEA

Telecom Provider Turns Two Days of Work into 20 Minutes with CaseWare IDEA®

Success Stories & Testimonials

About

One of the world’s largest communication companies connects millions of people, companies and communities with technology. The internal audit team is also leveraging technology to analyze trends, tendencies and patterns within customer and financial data.

Challenge

Like many large corporations, this telecommunications provider collects and stores data in different systems and formats. Internal auditors wanted to extract data from different databases to analyze trends and tendencies using client, employee, system access, billing and accounts payable data. Auditors also wanted a tracking mechanism to establish best practices among their staff of more than 50 professionals and increase the quality and consistency by automating repeatable processes to reduce manual work.

Highlights:

Large amounts of data stored in different databases needed to be analyzed
Auditors wanted a tracking mechanism to improve quality, consistency and automate repeatable processes
IDEA used to import and analyze hundreds of millions of records to produce reports
Turned two days of work into 20 minutes with IDEA

Typical data sets topped hundreds of millions of rows, which could not be combined into a spreadsheet without crashing the program. Running formulas on the larger data sets using Microsoft Excel took an exorbitant amount of time.

Solution

Auditors selected IDEA and provided staff with customized hands-on training from Audimation Services. Almost immediately, auditors found IDEA easy to use, faster and more robust than Excel. Auditors pair IDEA with a variety of tools and processes in order to extract, access and prepare data for analysis.

For a specific project, auditors performed an SQL query of 100 million records into IDEA. They used several of IDEA’s built-in audit functions including joins and summarizations to narrow the data sets, JustNumbers to perform cross-matching and History to track each action performed. IDEA is also used to perform text extractions from PDF files and in combination with the ETL process to query exactly the data needed for specific requests, combine data from multiple sources and prepare it for analysis.

When we want to analyze extremely large data sets, we use IDEA and have yet to max out its capacity. It gives us an opportunity to combine data from different sources and narrow it down to focus on exactly what we need. We’re able to look at a process, make recommendations for improvement and get management answers to critical business questions. IDEA has saved us hours of effort and helped improve the quality and consistency of our work.

- Business Intelligence Consultant

Results

By using IDEA, the company has been able to gather big data from disparate systems, distill it down to meet their needs and perform various analytics to get answers for management. IDEA can handle hundreds of millions of records without fail to analyze trends and patterns within customer data, billing, accounts payable, employee access rights and more. Using IDEAScripts auditors have reduced a two-day, manual process into a 20-minute task.

They have also used Discover on data sets with fewer fields to quickly identify trends, patterns and anomalies using the customized visual dashboards. The Project Overview feature within IDEA provides a graphical representation of the entire audit or project process, which can be shared and used for documentation to improve consistency. Auditors are also using IDEA to build repeatable processes to save additional time and effort.

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