Enterprise Insights and SAP transformation
Client: Global consumer products company
Our Role: PwC used our Enterprise Insights, 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 Insights, Technology, Risk Assurance, Digital, SAP
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 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 Insights, an application that PwC had recently developed because controls testing and analytics are such common challenges across our client base of large enterprises. Enterprise Insights, 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.
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 Insights 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.
“It’s not every day that quantifiable ROI can be shown from compliance investments. I am proud of the foundation that our client has put in place and am excited to see how it continues to evolve.”
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:
And here’s the best part—the analytic processing that used to take days, or was not even possible, now takes minutes.
