Detect Fraud at the Transaction-Level with the New Approva BizRights 4.5
Posted on February 23rd, 2009 by Katina »Permalink
Approva today released the latest version of its BizRights® Platform and Controls Intelligence Suite Version 4.5 to help companies gain a 360 degree visibility of key controls at the transaction level. Audit Trail (AT) sat down with Kendra Ferraro, Approva’s Senior Product Marketing Manager to understand how companies can benefit from the new Approva BizRights version.
AT: Why is process-level monitoring a top priority for companies?
KF: When business is great, companies seem to only care about the bottom line. If they’ve exceeded their revenue goals, everything is peachy: bonuses are paid, shareholders are pleased, and expense accounts are endless. Why fix something that is not broken? As we’ve come to learn recently, a broken business process and strong performance are not mutually exclusive events. More and more companies are examining their business processes with a fine-tooth comb. What are they looking for? Basically anything that will help them identify where they can save costs (e.g. by increasing business process efficiencies, reducing the possibility for fines); increase revenue (e.g. through more efficient billing procedures and sales processing); and gain more confidence in the accuracy of their financial statements (e.g. through accurate revenue recognition and classification of debits and credits). Oh yeah, and it doesn’t hurt that they can impress their auditors, close their books faster and make life happier for business process owners to boot.
The value of process-level monitoring can come through identification of large business exceptions or thousands of small business exceptions. For example, just identifying a couple large overpayments, bogus vendors, or invalid payroll payments can show significant ROI. Business exceptions in small-amount transactions such as not taking advantage of vendor discounts, paying invoices too soon and issuing excess rebates can show significant deficits to the bottom line over time.
AT: What is the biggest advantage of transaction monitoring?
KF: Let’s take the example of a large global company that makes thousands of transactions on a quarterly basis. Without a controls monitoring solution to continuously monitor for exceptions, the company has no way to proactively mitigate a potential fraud from happening. This could cost the company millions of dollars in waste and inefficiency besides a huge jolt to the company’s reputation. Now with transaction monitoring technology, the same company can take a preventative approach to mitigating fraud and managing risk. Approva BizRights Version 4.5 has expanded baselining capabilities that proactively alert users when application configurations or sensitive master data fields are altered unexpectedly, exposing business processes to unnecessary disruption or compromising the integrity of underlying data. Moreover, transaction monitoring solutions like Approva provide actionable controls intelligence to accelerate follow-up and enable users to perform root cause analysis when anomalies occur, greatly reducing error rates and the risk of fraud.
In addition to the benefits of transaction monitoring in standard business processes such as procurement, sales and accounting, Approva helps companies monitor industry-specific controls. In the public sector, this could be monitoring how grants or federal funding is allocated and used. Our utilities customers are very interested in monitoring how rates are applied to their customers. In highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals and financial services, transaction monitoring can be configured to help companies automate their FDA and SEC compliance.
AT: How does Approva help companies to automate controls monitoring at the business process level?
KF: Approva helps companies automate their business process controls through a multi-step process. The first component is getting access to the data in companies’ business application systems. Approva packages many data adaptors for the most common ERPs such as SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft that accesses the data through a non-invasive minimal-impact method. For other commercial or custom-built applications, we provide a data mapping template and new adapters can be configured by using ETL tools such as SSIS or Informatica.
The next component is defining the rule set for monitoring the data. Approva has hundreds of standard rules that look for anomalies across the most prevalent business processes. Organizations can extend the scope of their controls through Approva’s user-friendly rule building interface, which caters to both business and technical audiences. Are you a business process owner who wants to monitor POs with a specific attribute? The rule interface does not require you to know how the attribute is technically stored. Are you familiar with the back-end database of your business application? Approva allows you to write rules based on the source system’s data model.
The third component is finding the intersection between your data and your rules. Approva’s powerful analytics engine quickly analyzes the data to find exceptions in the business process. Since it has the ability to look at data at a very granular level, it can show not only exceptions in your high level process (e.g. a purchase order before goods receipt), but also very low level exceptions (e.g. a purchase order before goods receipt to a non-preferred vendor where the purchase order amount changed after the purchase requisition was approved). The final component is being notified and viewing your exceptions. To accommodate multiple stakeholders, exceptions can be presented through a variety of channels and displays. Email notifications can be set-up to notify certain individuals or teams when certain exceptions are found. Within the BizRights, exceptions can be view at detailed, summary, and trending levels.
AT: What are the key benefits a company can realize with the new BizRights 4.5 edition?
KF: While we have made significant enhancements to BizRights’ transaction analytics capabilities with version 4.5, we’ve also focused on a variety of enhancements to our other product sets, including user access. On the analytics side, we continue to look for ways to monitor vast amounts of data, across multiple business applications with laser focus precision. To do this, we made several behind-the-scene changes such as implementing new technologies and refining logic algorithms at the data extraction and analysis levels. With these changes, we’ve found really promising performance gains in data extraction and analysis.
On the user access side, we’ve made significant improvements to our user provision and role management product, Access Manager. Companies can use Access Manager to centralize and streamline the process for provisioning new users or modifying existing user access across multiple business applications. Many new configuration options were introduced to increase the flexibility and scalability of these workflows.
Finally, a nifty new feature we introduced for our SAP customers is a self-service portal for SAP password resets. We heard our customers bemoan the hefty help desk cost for resetting passwords – especially those customers who outsource their SAP hosting. Now, users who can authenticate themselves within BizRights can reset their SAP passwords if they’ve forgotten it or it has been locked due to too many incorrect login attempts. The enhancements we’ve made across our business controls and user access products continue to help our customers gain confidence in the integrity of their business systems, processes and transactions by automating the way organizations monitor and respond to business exceptions.
Find out more about the Approva BizRights Version 4.5 here.
Tags: controls monitoring, general ledger monitoring, Approva BizRights, Approva, Process Analytics, fraud,
