Success Story

Manufacturers of Sheet Metal Components and Assemblies

Challenge

The company was forced to go on SAP system due to pressure from the customer. The company staff was used to carry out its operations in certain manner. When SAP was implemented users were expected to reengineer their processes. The discipline and the transparency required in the system was hardly followed by the users and hence, many of the good features of the software remain unutilized. The implementation partner also had limited proficiency in mapping business processes with the SAP processes. This lead to weak functional control environment.

Solution

The audit covered detailed review of the important modules of the software namely; Production Planning (PP); Materials Management (MM), Finance and Costing (FI & CO), Sales and Distribution (SD) and BASIS. The users work profile was studied vis-à-vis their respective access rights in the system. The configuration, setting of respective modules and the process mapping was studied by respective module expert. Unutilized features of SAP (or wrongly utilized) were analyzed and discussed with process owners, CEO and CFO. The report was presented to the Board with suggestions.

Result

The management came to know about which processes are handled outside the ERP system leading to weak controls. The process owners could discuss their shop floor problems and got guidance as to how to set the features in SAP. The security features which were left open or were not configured properly got exposed. Processes for master data feeding and engineering change control were reengineered introducing sound controls. The features; the use of which was not known even to the implementation partner were put into use. The company benefited largely due to the expertise of consultants and their proactive but independent audit approach.