Need for Internal Controls management with SAP GRC Process Control
Do you manage your business process controls manually? If yes this article /blog will highlight how SAP GRC Process Controls helps us manage internal controls better. Internal controls are critical for us to help maintain Quality and Compliance to internal as well as external policies.
Have you built your controls monitoring in the ERP? You might be using your ERP to run reports from your business warehouse tool but are the controls really tested and is there an alert mechanism? These questions give us the scope to build automated controls specific to our landscape. Controls which are tested and monitored and alert us before they fail.
Are your controls spread across different departments and managed individually by different departments? Controls Management across departments and business processes can be consolidated at a Group level of the organization. Documentation Management, Testing and Monitoring of the controls across a multi-national can also be centralized today.
Is Compliance Management as a challenge since there are so many compliances? Manufacturing, Utilities and defense industry as an example today require so many different compliances to be adhered. We can’t have different teams to manage these different compliances. We need a centralized compliance management where common data around business processes, stakeholders, reporting and alert mechanism can cover for as many compliance requirements we have
Dynamic Compliance requirements are a challenge? Changing templates for Compliances are difficult to be tracked and kept note of by one individual client. We need a service provider to tell us and update the compliance template like an upgrade to help us match to the new change and comply.
Do we burn a lot of efforts in testing controls and sign off? Not all the controls today need to be manually tested, a lot of data is in the system already and hence the test can be automated procedure. Our efforts should be spent around only controls for which data is not there in the system and those which require physical activity.
Modern tools for managing controls like SAP GRC Process control help us address these questions. It is time we move from manual controls documentation to dashboards and alerts to tell us which control needs our attention.
