Internal audit is an essential, yet arduous process. And the events of the past year have made it even harder.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has been a significant shock for the audit profession. At this time of heightened economic frailty, performing high-quality audits is fundamentally more crucial, but harder to execute,” in the FRC Developments in Audit 2020 report.
Thankfully, automation can help. Automation platforms can improve efficiency to help employees to do their job better while ensuring consistency and compliance, and offering additional business insight.
Here are four benefits you can expect to see from automating your audit process, and real-life examples of how Bizagi customers implemented solutions.
One of the most immediately obvious benefits of automating the audit process is the efficiency that it brings. Manual, time-consuming activities can be automated and carried out by digital platforms, so employees can be freed up to focus on higher-value activities, and no additional staff need to hired to fulfill the audit function.
Bizagi customer JSR Micro, a manufacturer, and supplier of semiconductor solutions, have multiple legal and financial audit requirements, both internal and external, such as numerous ISOs, customer supplier selection audits environmental impact documents to complete, but they were taking up significant time.
Audits are an essential part of their quality assurance, so they introduced Bizagi’s low-code platform to institutionalize these processes through automation - ensuring they are followed consistently, with a full audit trail to match, which can be produced in minutes through an integrated dashboard. They were able to implement this solution with no additional IT headcount thanks to low-code automation.
JSR Micro has won numerous top supplier quality awards from their large suppliers that audit their processes and process compliance. They are able to participate in those audits much more quickly and convincingly – producing documentation and evidence in just a few clicks, saving time and money for all involved.
One of the most time and labor-intensive elements of the audit process is collecting all the necessary information. Using an automation platform allows organizations to integrate data from disparate sources and provide complete visibility to ensure that no information falls through the cracks.
For the State Finance Secretariat for the Brazilian State of Ceará, known as SEFAZ, auditing is a major process that plays a significant role in its responsibilities. The process previously relied on a combination of email and paper forms so required automation to make the gathering of information for audits, and the audits themselves, more efficient.
Prior to automation during the administration phase, users had to make queries manually across more than 10 systems to gather the information needed for audits. The auditor would then have to use text editors to create a document each time to show their findings. This manual effort took time and meant that auditors could be prone to errors.
Bizagi generates a standardized document for each individual audit, further accelerating the time taken to complete the process. The administrative element of the process was also automated, with Bizagi gathering information from other systems at SEFAZ and pulling it all into one standardized form, ready for the auditors to complete their tasks.
Across many industries, proving compliance through internal audits is a necessity. But it often has to be undertaken as a manual, separate task. When a process is mapped out as a workflow and automated through a centralized platform, all the information is captured and automatically, so you can rest assured that all actions in the process are fully audited and captured.
Bizagi customer Generali CEE Holding needed to transform the way its Corporate Risk underwriting department did business. By making the leap from paper-based systems to efficient workflows and automated processes, they were not only able to reduce the underwriting time by up to 50%, but also ensure compliance, which is essential in an industry as highly-regulated as insurance.
By mapping out and automating all their corporate risk processes, there was complete visibility over the end to end process. This also allowed the team to have the agility to adapt the process to respond to changing regulations, as they could make individual changes to the process models, as and when new rules were announced by the governing bodies.
Before any process can be automated, it must be mapped out. This aids with visibility and allows businesses to see exactly how processes will be carried out. This can enable them to uncover business insights that they would otherwise have been unaware of.
An international oil and gas exploration and production company sparked an initiative to digitally transform their land management application, which helps manage their sites. The organization was saturated in paper documents and rules by stringent legislation, so they wanted to make the business more transparent and efficient.
By uniting data sources, they created a centralized collaboration portal with a comprehensive audit trail, which allowed them to review their processes and the way business was done. This led to an annual saving of over $85,500 per year.
“The biggest benefit of digitizing a process is the improved audit trail. For us it's really important to have document retention, so to have them all centralized in one place has allowed us to make decisions we didn't even know that we were going to have questions about,” said their director of Information Services.
