Client’s challenge
As one of the largest agricultural commodity businesses in the world, this public company employs over 25,000 people globally and produces annual revenues in excess of $25 billion. The management team recently turned its attention to strengthening the company’s IT internal controls. Meeting global compliance requirements was a top priority. But corporate leadership also recognized that a centralized approach to internal controls was needed if the company was to continue relying on the highly decentralized business model necessary to its many global businesses. Senior executives realized that critical to such a centralized approach was the ability to manage access to the company’s many internal applications by employees, partners and suppliers. Turning to PwC, the company requested a comprehensive analysis of its business processes as well as its IT business applications and systems in order to create a standardized access control model for all of its globally dispersed businesses.
PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory solution
The PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) team started by assessing the company’s critical business processes and organizational structure – including internal and external user roles, job responsibilities and policies on segregation of duties. Working with business stakeholders to define access requirements, PwC developed a standardized access control model compatible with the company’s software development processes. This model defined common security services for authentication and authorization shared across applications and legacy components of the company’s existing IT infrastructure.
Impact on client’s business
PwC’s work helped the company meet its regulatory compliance and operational performance objectives by establishing a reliable, repeatable and verifiable way to manage user access across the enterprise. By establishing centralized access control, PwC reduced duplication in the company’s IT architecture, eliminated the need to for application-specific access controls and helped the client realize an estimated annual savings of several million dollars in IT maintenance costs. Most importantly, PwC helped this client leverage technology to support the business model that continues to provide the foundation for billions of dollars in annual revenue.
