Automation makes governance and compliance in SAP easy

It’s often said that the only constant in life is change. It’s certainly true in business: your organization must always be ready to adapt as market conditions and customer preferences change – with or without warning.

But rapid change – often spurred by new technologies that, in turn, require business processes to evolve – is the greatest enemy of governance, risk management and compliance.

Complexity creates risk

Organizations are always under pressure to control their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other critical business systems so they can mitigate risks in areas such as secure access, financial reporting and regulatory compliance.

Yet, many fail to manage these controls effectively. Complex technological ecosystem make risk management a significant challenge, and it’s not only large enterprises that are affected by this. Even small organizations now have distributed operations that are complicated by interrelated transactions and processes.

High volumes of data flowing across systems, transactions, processes, roles and relationships also exacerbate risk. And when internal control management is done manually or in silos – and, too often, as a periodic exercise without full visibility of the organization’s people, processes and systems – the risks only get bigger.

The value of automation in SAP

For executives and directors, internal control management is a serious issue, as they have fiduciary obligations to manage risk and compliance as part of their business strategy.

By automating these internal controls in your organization and getting real-time insights into issues that need addressing, you can continuously strengthen your risk and control management.

Enter ControlPanelGRC, our governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and continuous control monitoring platform for SAP ERP environments. It’s designed to automate time-consuming tasks associated with compliance reporting and audit support.

Stronger controls, stronger compliance

Using four distinct solution suites (access controls, security accelerators, Basis controls and process controls), ControlPanelGRC flags risks and suggests actions to remedy these risks. This makes audit preparation much faster and easier, and allows you to quickly address vulnerabilities identified in audits – freeing up your staff to focus on other tasks.

• Access controls manage SAP access and segregation of duties (SoD) compliance. (SoD refers to dividing critical tasks and responsibilities among individuals to prevent conflicts of interest, fraud and errors. No single person has complete control over a process or transaction from start to finish, thereby enhancing internal controls.)
• Security accelerators are used to automate the routing of SAP security administration tasks.
• Basis controls provide a way of automating SAP Basis administrative tasks such as transports and batch jobs.
• Process controls help you monitor and remediate issues with key SAP business processes in real time.

The platform can assist a range of employees in your organization:

• Business users can self-assess risk, using reports pushed to them in the ControlPanelGRC workflow.
• Technical users can perform root-cause analysis and get remediation options.
• Auditors can review automatically generated reports to validate controls.

A training program gets you up and running quickly – implementation usually takes less than a week – and we offer 24x7 support.

ControlPanelGRC is modular, so you buy only what you need, making it a cost-effective solution. You can also access ControlPanelGRC on a subscription basis, which means no upfront investment, and maintenance is included in the monthly fee.

ControlPanelGRC in action

NTT DATA has deployed ControlPanelGRC for a luxury electric automotive manufacturer – against the backdrop of migrating their SAP environment to Amazon Web Services – to automate tasks related to user access, security and Basis administration while embedding audit requirements and compliance in their day-to-day processes.

The manufacturer went live with SAP S/4HANA Cloud with key functionality that included:

• SoD analysis of legacy transactions and Fiori apps, for user and role design
• Automated role testing and accelerated user acceptance testing
• Change management with self-documenting approvals and automated migration

NTT DATA’s SAP streamlining and support services made a notable positive difference in the manufacturer’s service delivery, work quality, project timelines, monitoring capabilities, security practices and customer engagements. Our expertise was also flagged in their quarterly business review.

Take the next step

When it comes to managing risk and enforcing governance, there is no reason to delay taking the necessary steps to protect your business.

By continuously monitoring your SAP environment with ControlPanelGRC, you can be confident that you’re meeting all your compliance requirements.