Big4Guy

Yesterday, I talked about SAP's GRC initiative and how it is useful to company's in their governance risk and compliance efforts. SAP GRC process controls helps in strengthening controls by continuously monitoring them. Most SOX directors agree that compliance needs to be a continuous process i.e. identifying fraud, process gaps, risks needs to be inbuilt within the entire application framework.

To enable this, SAP GRC monitors master data and also configuration setups within the various SAP modules like FICO, SD, MM, PP, PS and points out specific transaction entries which could potentially pose a risk. This sort of automated monitoring based on data rules is very useful as it can reduce the manual checking effort to a minimum. SAP GRC can be leveraged so that internal auditors can only focus on high risk and high impact transactions. To take an example, in the purchase to pay process, SAP GRC can be used to monitor vendor payments for duplicacy. Similarly, duplicate vendors and how cash position is affected after each payment can also be followed. All such functionalities in SAP GRC application suite can give a strong level of comfort to the statutory auditor in assessing the financial statements and forming an opinion.

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