ERP Implementation Reviews

Ensuring compliance and security of your financial reporting

In ERP implementations, security and control requirements frequently take a backseat to other project deliverables, jeopardizing the successful delivery of a system compliant with internal control requirements. Key security and compliance workstreams should be part of any ERP implementation design and be accompanied by appropriate budgeting, reporting and accountability. Key business stakeholders within the organization, such as the chief financial officer, the chief information officer and the chief audit executive, can provide the much needed support for the security and compliance workstreams by sending clear signals to the project management office that getting security and controls right the first time is a priority. This work is especially crucial in an age where fraud and security breaches are often front-page news or material weaknesses are reported due to system vulnerabilities after go-live.

Due to a variety of competing project management priorities during ERP implementations, it is common to deprioritize system security and internal control requirements in favor of functional readiness. Invariably, this means that the technical security and compliance workstreams are scrambling to build and test their deliverables just prior to go-live, leading to a rushed and unsustainable system security architecture, excessive user access and lack of configurable controls. In such cases, significant compliance gaps often are discovered during post-implementation audits, creating the need for costly security and controls redesign projects to remediate large risk exposures.

Typically, the company’s external auditor will be concerned about aspects of the system implementation that could potentially result in significant disclosure errors due to data integrity issues. Data conversion and system testing are primary focal points.

This is where we come in, our pre-implementation assessment service guides the business teams right from early phase of the implementation program

Our Approach ensures:

• The scope and strategy for data conversion is clearly defined and approved by the business owners
• Quality of the source data is assessed early in the program
• Business Process Readiness and Solution Design
• Security and Internal Control Compliance
• UAT testing is performed consistently to assess the impact of fixes for failed tests on test cases already passed.
• The conversion process does not miss key data, establish an effective fallout (defect) management process.
• Project team followed a sound and comprehensive data conversion process
• Developing documentation that shows that the company followed a sound and comprehensive data conversion process
• Developing documentation that shows that the company followed a sound and comprehensive data conversion process