Achieving Full Audit Compliance Across SAP Landscapes

A multinational pharma company gained real-time visibility and control over transactional processes, ensuring continuous compliance across their SAP landscape.
Client
A multinational pharmaceutical company
Industry
Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences
Region
Global, 34 countries
Time to value
14 weeks to continuous audit readiness
100%
Of in-scope transactions covered by automated controls
34
Country entities on one compliance model
0
Audit findings raised in the following two cycles
The challenge

What was standing in the way

Audit preparation was a project rather than a state. Ahead of each cycle, teams across five SAP instances pulled evidence by hand, reconciled it in spreadsheets and reconstructed approval histories from email. The work took eight weeks and produced a snapshot that was already out of date by the time it was reviewed.

In a regulated industry that snapshot approach is expensive twice over: once in effort, and once in the exposure that sits in the gap between two audits.

  • Eight weeks of manual evidence gathering ahead of every audit cycle
  • Approval history reconstructed from email rather than from system records
  • Controls interpreted differently across the five SAP instances
  • No view of compliance status between audit cycles
The solution

How Promenta approached it

Promenta moved compliance from a periodic exercise to a continuous one. Controls are defined once, applied inside SAP at the point of transaction, and evidenced automatically as a by-product of normal work rather than as a separate reporting effort.

  • Segregation of duties enforced in the workflow, not checked afterwards
  • Every approval captured with actor, timestamp and reason
  • One control definition applied across all five SAP instances
  • Evidence packs generated on demand for any date range
  • Exception reporting surfaced daily rather than at cycle end
The results

What changed

The company now treats audit readiness as an ongoing property of the system. Evidence that previously took eight weeks to assemble is produced on request, and the two audit cycles following go-live closed with no findings against transactional process controls.

  • Audit evidence preparation reduced from eight weeks to on-demand
  • Continuous rather than point-in-time compliance visibility
  • One consistent control model across 34 country entities
  • No findings raised against transactional controls in two cycles
We used to prepare for audits. Now we are simply ready for them, and the difference in what that costs the organisation is substantial.
Global Head of Internal Controls
Multinational Pharmaceutical Company

Ready to write your own success story?

Talk to a Promenta specialist about the SAP processes costing you the most time, and we will show you what automating them looks like in your landscape.