PROCESS MINING CAN MAKE


BUSINESS HEROES OUT OF FINANCE


DEPARTMENTS Says Alexander Rinke,


co-founder and co-CEO, Celonis


approaches more efficient. In the face of higher expectations for accuracy, big data is changing the way that organisations operate and can present huge opportunities to drive transformation. Here, we look at some key areas of finance that, by making use of data in the right way, could evolve the perception of the department from a support function into a driver of business success.


A


Helping auditors drive business change For years, auditors have used interviews and workshops to conduct successful company assessments. But to keep up with the pace of change in today’s competitive market, auditors need to blend traditional techniques with a more data-led approach. Despite this, PwC’s 2018 State of the Internal Audit Profession study showed that only 14 percent of audit professionals are advanced in their adoption of technology – clearly there is still progress to be made. Unrivalled access to the organisation’s data provides internal auditing with a unique


opportunity to support finance directors.


However, with


great power comes great responsibility. As business processes involve greater volumes of information and become more complex,


auditors


are under increasing pressure to use


Alexander Rinke


s businesses become increasingly digitised, consider


to make


finance directors must how


their


analytics to turn assets into insights. This means understanding the inner workings of those processes instead of basing audits on a small data sample. But how can internal audit teams capitalise on the wealth of data available to increase efficiency and help leadership understand emerging business risks?


Unrivalled access to the organisation’s


data provides internal auditing with a unique opportunity to support finance directors


Despite the potential of data-driven


methods, integrating technology into the audit


process has traditionally proven


to be difficult, given that it still relies on obtaining relevant information. However, internal teams should theoretically have the information more readily to hand than external contractors tasked with collating requests from around a business. This is a two-way exercise, however, and finance leaders have a vital role to play in enabling this access, by encouraging a strategy defined by continuous auditing. Therefore, analytics has become a key facet of internal audit strategy, by freeing up auditors to manage risk more proactively, rather than focusing on data aggregation. Although


traditional methods help auditors eliminate manual errors,


conducting an audit based on accurate, real-time information can help streamline approvals,


timelines, exceptions and


violations in order to improve processes and avoid risks. As more advanced tools such as automated data capture enter the arsenal of the auditor, internal departments can analyse swathes of unstructured data such as contracts and trading information. Notably, this can help identify fraudulent activity that needs investigating. More generally, it enables a focus on higher risk areas rather than arbitrarily sampling areas of a business. However, the potential is there to do much more.


Power up purchasing Where did this invoice come from? Why was an order placed with this supplier? With efficiency largely defining success, these are questions that any head of purchasing should not have to concern themselves with. Purchasing is a function that has historically been slow to join the digital revolution, prioritising cost-cutting rather than integrating with innovative technology to add value. However, the rise of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions is making this facet of business more standardised and documented. What’s more, ProcureCon’s CPO Study 2017 reveals that procurement processes will be automated by an overwhelming majority (97%) of CPOs over the next 18 months. This increase in automation – from


negotiating to settlement of invoices – creates a significant volume of data, in turn, enabling individuals to interpret and learn from it to make improvements. Regardless


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