Hi Guys-

I have been a poor correspondent! I have been working on a number of client success stories, digging thru the value and clarifying it. Here’s one that might be interesting. It combines ITIL, CoBIT, good governance, good process, and efficiency gains all in one! Proof you can automate compliance with Sox 404 and gain efficiency too.

I welcome your feedback. Please forgive the more formal tone–it is a “marketing” piece. But–it really did happen!

Automate SOX 404 Compliance, Reduce Risk, Improve Quality, & Reduce Costs. A Bridge Too Far?

Challenge:
GlobalFoods, based in Europe, is one of world’s top 5 grocers. They watched the first round of Sarbanes Oxley compliance efforts in the US. What they learned was this: multiple compliance requirements are here to stay, so it makes sense to address the need strategically and make compliancy a core competency.

But Retail is a commoditized, highly competitive market, with narrow margins. Future competitive differentiation rests on knowing each customer, reacting quickly to change, improving inventory effectiveness, and driving down costs.

Any opportunity to actually improve IT execution at the same time would be very valuable to help face the increasing complexity and rising volume of change facing IT.

Approach:
IT management saw opportunity. There was a belief that core service delivery processes could be improved significantly, with potential to deliver effective compliance, but also to simplify the work, improve the quality, and improve the consistency.

GlobalFoods turned to their long term partner, Evergreen Systems, based on five key factors:

• Proven track record of success with GlobalFoods
• Deep understanding of IT operations in Fortune 1000 Grocers
• Strong experience and best practices for enterprise level change and compliance solutions
• Ability to lead large, complex entities through organizational change
• Depth of knowledge in the Peregrine suite of technologies

Evergreen worked with the client to identify the key, high volume processes that might benefit from process improvement while meeting compliance requirements.

Recommendations:
Lead GlobalFoods from strategic design to operational adoption.

Design:
Design a single IT Process Framework built on ITIL and CoBIT standards, but simplified to address only the business needs of GlobalFoods.

Baseline and Improve:
Analyze current processes, define best practice based improvements, simplify processes and ensure policy adherence

Integrate process and technology:
Upgrade systems to reflect process with technology improvements, create user self service portal

Drive adoption:
Train, support, and lead organization to adopt new processes and technology, leveraging portal as an adoption mechanism

Results:

Prior to this, GlobalFoods estimated that 70%+ of all IT changes were done without record or via approved Sarbanes Oxley compliant process, clearly out of compliance. This put the company at risk not only for compliance, but also for potentially significant business disruption events.

By automating policy compliance through a user self service portal with a change risk calculator, GlobalFoods got 100% policy conformance in 2 weeks, and significantly eased the burden of routing, reviewing, and approving requested changes. They estimate an efficiency gain in IT overall of 15-20% but most importantly?they now have an automated way to quickly achieve adoption of new policy / processes for the organization.

Not surprisingly, they passed their 404 Sox compliance review with flying colors.

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