Are Your Financial Controls Ready for SAP S/4HANA?

As organizations are transforming their business with SAP S/4HANA, they’re reinventing business processes and eliminating redundancies to focus more on exceptions and critical tasks, ultimately resulting in better decision making. But a key consideration must be the impact on financial controls and alignment not only with redefined business processes, but also with the next-generation technology that supports them. You should be asking the important questions: Are our financial controls ready for SAP S/4HANA? Are we prepared for our next audit?

While you’re evaluating the impact on your risk and controls framework, you should also be searching for opportunities to add value and improve the business. Consider this: What if you were able to analyze months of past user activity to reveal financial and process risk exposure during blueprinting to eliminate transfer of ineffective controls and risks to your new SAP S/4HANA system? And what if you could go live with automated, exception-based controls for continuous visibility of access risks across all users and all business processes? Now you can — with SAP HANA and Access Violation Management (AVM) by Greenlight.

Reduce Materialized Risks

A certain level of access risk is unavoidable — to eliminate it all would limit business productivity. Next-generation ERP systems will not change this, and controls will still be required to mitigate these risks. But for many companies, these controls are manually driven, time consuming, and costly to enforce. And locating actual exceptions can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

With AVM and SAP HANA, you’ll be able to identify every instance where actual violations have materialized, regardless of current or past user access. You can accomplish this by automating the identification and review of materialized access violations across all users and business processes, regardless of underlying technology. By doing so, you’ll also minimize the manual activities associated with traditional mitigating controls monitoring and auditing, enabling your business to focus more on exceptions and critical tasks, and less on “check-the-box” compliance activities.

Quantify Financial Impact from Access Violations

When exceptions are put in the context of dollars and cents, they garner a different level of understanding and attention from the business. Through deeper analysis with AVM, you’ll be able to see your financial exposure from unresolved access risks and then effectively communicate the financial risks to your organization to drive positive business process change. By taking this approach, you can make access decisions based on financial impact instead of incomplete or misunderstood technical data. With enhanced visibility and control, finance teams can avoid costly access violations and other financial risks and instead focus on optimizing business processes.

Get Started on Lowering Financial Risk

Now is the perfect time to start transforming the way you manage governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) and harness it to provide greater value to the business. You can minimize your exposure of significant audit findings and be confident that any issues are identified and resolved prior to your audit. This in turn improves the integrity of your business transactions, reduces the risk of fraud, and lowers your cost of compliance.

To learn more, visit www.greenlightcorp.com.