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Financial services firm Harris has found an ROI with its purchase of software from LogicalApps. Darlene Mac Cormac knew segregation of duties was an area she’d have to address. Mac Cormac is vice-president of procurement and strategic sourcing at Harris in Chicago, which is part of the publicly traded BMO Financial Group.
The company’s existing review process was manual and incredibly time-consuming. With all the steps required, it took Harris about two months to go through its annual segregation-of-duties review, Mac Cormac says. “It was just a waste of senior people’s time.”
A few months ago, Harris went live with LogicalApps’ software, which embeds controls for enforcing regulatory mandates and business policies within the firm’s Oracle ERP applications. The controls help manage user access privileges, for example, while dashboards and reporting features alert managers to potential red flags. “Now when we do these audits, we’re not doing them manually, once a year,” Mac Cormac says.
In addition, Harris has been able to close hidden gaps before they were exploited. “No matter how thorough a job we thought we were doing, we knew we weren’t catching everything, and that was blatant the first time we ran the LogicalApps tool sets,” Mac Cormac says. “When they came out with the reports, I was floored at some of things that people could do. We’d just never realized because we’d never dug that deep.”
One big payoff is in manual time saved. “It paid for itself in the reduction in time for doing our regular routine audits,” Mac Cormac says. In addition, the software’s configurability has helped conserve development resources. “So any monies that we would have spent customizing the Oracle applications, or the Oracle forms, to do some of the things we wanted, we’re able to do it with these tools.”
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