Finding a Cleaner Process for Sarbanes-Oxley

Situation

• A team of five full-time employees and one part-time hire at an energy company were using SAP® GRC and Microsoft® Excel for its SOX needs.
• Constantly saving updated drafts of each document was a headache and made it difficult to find the latest narrative.
• The team was having trouble proving that an updated document was sent to a coworker and that it was received.
• External auditors were limited in what they could work on until they were granted network access.
• The SOX manager was encouraged to try Wdesk by those who had used it for financial reporting.
   

Why Wdesk works for this SOX team

• Because the company was already using Wdesk for financial reporting, the SOX team trusted that the cloud-based solution would be a good fit as well.
• The company is constantly encouraged to cut costs, so purchasing Wdesk was easy to justify in time savings and efficiency gains.
• The company ran a cost analysis over a 10-year period and found significant savings.
• Each team member can see who made what changes and when, thanks to the blackline feature in Wdesk.
• Every change or edit is time stamped and shared amongst all team members, so there's no question whether or not something was changed, when it was changed, and if everyone saw it.
• As soon as the SOX manager tried Wdesk, she says everything changed: "I was just so blown away by the product potential. I made the effort and sought it out."

Results

• “The certification process has been a huge help to my team as far as making it easier, cleaner, and smarter,” says the SOX manager.
• Linking saves the team members extraordinary amounts of time—they can make a change in the narrative and be confident that the change was made throughout the entire document.
• Team members have up to two more hours a day to focus on their responsibilities and are no longer working excessive amounts of overtime.
• Internal personnel spend less time helping external auditors test controls and get access to current information because the auditors are able to access the latest document in Wdesk.

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