Global consumer product company compliance transformation: PwC

How did a leading global consumer products company leverage technology to automate ERP controls monitoring and improve compliance?

^{_{Client: Global consumer products company}}
_{^{Our Role: PwC used our Enterprise Control, utilizing SAP HANA, to help address operational compliance, risk management and analytics across large data sets, and to consolidate five separate platforms into one.

Industry: Consumer Markets

Services: Enterprise Control, Technology, Risk Assurance, Digital, SAP}}

How do you scale compliance technology capabilities to create value?

Our client, a global consumer products company, had made a significant investment in deploying SAP across the globe, including advancing security, controls and GRC capabilities to take advantage of the SAP investment. This investment both improved and created a control environment with a high degree of automated and preventive controls. With this shift toward automation and having better access to data, our client had taken steps toward the next level of maturity by creating automated continuous monitoring capabilities through analytics and configuration monitoring tools—but had struggled to achieve scale in a cost-efficient manner.

The result was disparate compliance monitoring processes and multiple technologies that individually and collectively only achieved a portion of the desired outcome—a cost-efficient compliance solution that also drove business value. Our client knew they needed to transform their approach to compliance by leveraging technology differently to digitally enable the process, lower costs and drive better value. They asked PwC to help.

PwC’s Enterprise Control helped the client address operational compliance, risk management and analytics

PwC had a longstanding, trusted relationship with the client across multiple lines of service, including in the SAP controls and compliance space. This deep relationship allowed PwC and our client leaders to collaborate on practical options to move the needle, including demonstrating quantifiable ROI on compliance investment.

Specifically, our client was a perfect candidate for Enterprise Control, an application that PwC had recently developed because controls testing and analytics are such common challenges across our client base of large enterprises. Enterprise Control, utilizing SAP HANA, enabled our client to address operational compliance, risk management and analytics across large data sets, and to consolidate five separate platforms into one. Paired with their existing data visualization capability, the client’s business teams were able to drive better insight and control their own destiny.

Streamlining configuration control testing

The client was now able to more efficiently automate risk-focused, transactional key performance indicators (KPIs) and streamline configuration control testing across six ERP instances. The use of Enterprise Control also allowed the client to overcome data extraction challenges and further automate end-to-end compliance processes, which permitted control owners to review exception results and act in a more proactive way, driving cost savings and business value.

30% cost reduction in global controls testing

Controls testing and the refining of the analytics suite are constants, and our client’s team is now able to work directly with the new platform for data extractions, testing and remediation. So far, the results have been impressive:

Automation of approximately 90% of all configurable control tests across eight ERP instances.

Year-over-year cost reduction of 30% for global controls testing thanks to technology enablement and process efficiency.

Reduced business time requirements to analyze test results and take appropriate action.

Identification of major opportunities across the business thanks to exception-based transactional analytics, including process enhancements, security and controls improvements and direct cost savings.

Enterprise Control will be the primary platform to support the company’s upcoming ERP and go-to market transformation to manage the compliance governance model, including risks, controls, testing, compliance analytics, reporting, workflow, incident management and evidence collection.

Enterprise Control has since become the foundation for the company’s global, risk-based analytics program across multiple lines of defense, which provides action-oriented, risk-based KPIs to business users across the globe.

And here’s the best part—the analytic processing that used to take days, or was not even possible, now takes minutes.