The Console - more than just a dashboard
A single point from which to view
and manage all the output from your Governance rules, the console
adds reporting visibility and consolidates a real-time summary of their
status.
Starting
with a high level view and then drilling down to the level of
granularity desired, this multi-tiered approach allows an “at a glance”
view for an executive summary of the overall position or a more
in-depth view for details around specific exceptions.
A configurable, role based view of the console delivers a simple and clean user experience and means that information overload is avoided by focusing only on the specific view appropriate to the particular interest or requirements of the user.
It can be integrated with other pre-existing displays or dashboards if desired.
Work flow
Designed to allow multiple collaborative working, in conjunction with the console this feature facilitates central allocation of exceptions and events for further investigation and logging of owners and actions.
Multiple recipients can be assigned to receive the output from the rules and exceptions (different roles/ departments/ organizations – for escalation etc) and it is even possible to extend visibility and tracking beyond organizational boundaries if desired (external audit, regulators etc - or simply other organizations within the supply chain).
A fine grain “snooze” feature allows the suppression of further alert notifications for specific records for a period of time specified by the user. e.g. an authorized auditor can "snooze" notification about an individual instance of a control failure for a day while they investigate - therefore preventing repeat notification of the fact that the control has been disabled. If, after a day the issue hasn't been resolved then the notifications will resume. This is useful where a rule runs frequently and one exception may generate multiple notifications while the initial investigation is still underway.
Use of this work flow functionality demonstrates corporate commitment to proactive management and tracking of the chosen rules/ controls/ KPIs.
It can also be used in conjunction with improvement activities and remediation actions (useful for providing visibility to audit groups for example) and helps support corporate transparency initiatives.
Publishing
This powerful reporting feature allows immediate Ad Hoc report generation to give real time assurance regarding your organization's current Governance position in relation to these rules. Alternatively it can be scheduled to publish reports at a specific time in the form of a document or a web page.
The simple to use visual report designer has charting capabilities built in and can create report templates to configure the output to look as required by the corporate standard.
Included with Accord:
Useful in detecting error and fraud, this module allows the analysis of a set of numbers to see if their distribution complies with Benford's law and other expected distributions ( Note: "Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit is 1 almost one-third of the time, and larger numbers occur as the leading digit with less and less frequency as they grow in magnitude, to the point that 9 is the first digit less than one time in twenty”).
Accord has a comprehensive suite of modules for retrieving data from a variety of business information sources such as EDI docs, XML files, message queues, HTTP requests, SAP BAPI or RFCs or native API calls as well as the most frequently used method for retrieving data - using standard SQL database queries.
In addition to supporting easy rule creation for all of the above, it has been our experience that SAP – the market leading ERP system - in particular has its own unique structure and characteristics that can challenge even the most experienced user.
Because of the complex nature of the rules and controls that need to work within SAP to achieve the required level of assurance – interacting with multiple data fields and repositories with potential duplications and multiple interdependencies for example - Categoric has created templates to demonstrate how using our solution makes rule creation simple and straightforward and takes away the pain of interacting with systems like SAP.
Our simple to use SAP data browser allows you to easily interrogate and access the data within SAP using standard SAP interfaces without having to create complex database queries - making rule creation straight forward and removing a technical trauma and potential bottleneck.
Examples created from "Purchase to Pay" and "Order to Cash" rules include:
- Idle vendors
- Vendor invoices paid before due date
- Vendor invoices paid after due date
- Manually overwritten prices in sales orders (authorization)
- Manually overwritten prices in sales orders with conditions (non standard pricing)
- Open sales orders
These rules used for financial compliance show how there may be several "interested parties" who would value interaction and notification of exceptions/alerts within the wider business.
This also demonstrates how rules can be easily "re-purposed" by other business areas within an organization. It becomes a straight forward matter to build up a "library" of rule designs that can simply be "tweaked" by changing the data source and/or recipient.
Customer specific rules development
As mentioned in the "Services" section, Categoric can offer a service to develop client rules that reflect their own unique requirements - whether for financial or non-financial compliance and governance or even for operational or business performance improvements.
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