How a Healthcare Giant Transformed Their Internal Audit Processes
This anonymized case study highlights how we helped an international healthcare company transform its internal audit processes. How? By implementing efficient information-sharing solutions and streamlining audit practices.
Company background
An international healthcare company headquartered in the U.K. served over 38 million customers. It employed 84,000 people worldwide. Its mission? Improve lives by ensuring people live longer and better than before while making the world a better place.
Their ambition was to be the world’s most customer-centric healthcare company. They provided health insurance, health provision services, digital healthcare, clinics, dental centers, hospitals, and senior care services across countries like Australia, the U.K., and Spain.
For their Group Internal Audit team (GIA), comprised of nearly 100 individuals across Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and the U.K, efficiency in audit practices and information sharing was integral to the function’s success. The team completed nearly 200 annual audits. They worked to identify opportunities to improve control effectiveness and outline necessary remedial actions for management.
They recognized there were some challenges in the efficiency of its auditing processes. There were also challenges in sharing information across a global network of employees with varying digital permissions and access.
Fixing what was broken
As the audit function continued to expand internationally, the GIA was keen to address the following key process challenges:
- Workflow – Prior to their partnership with SAI360, their internal audit processes were completed manually. Inefficiently across email processes were present across the organization. This manual approach left room for mistakes. It also extended the timeline for audit completion. Extensive documentation, including data files, spreadsheets, department information, and results was included in each audit and shared via email. This made it inefficient to track key information.
- Policies and Procedures – Without a centralized hub for storing and sharing information, there was no single source of truth for the audit process and results. This made it harder to accurately report on and demonstrate compliance regarding relevant standards and regulations.
- Information Sharing – Collaborating across an expansive geographic footprint and within several departments meant sending documents via email. Often, this was done without a way for multiple members of the internal audit team to cross-check audits and documentation. This created a silo of information that was not readily available to the company. This lack of a centralized info hub decreased collaboration within the internal audit department. It also contributed to inefficiencies when sharing best practices across the wider global team.
SAI360’S PARTNERSHIP TO TRANSFORM INTERNAL AUDIT PROCESSES
This international healthcare company first partnered with SAI360 in 2015, seeking a comprehensive audit process solution. After careful evaluation of challenges, we collaborated on improvements to their operations. As an internal audit and compliance specialist, SAI360 was able to offer:
- A Centralized Hub – Clients gained access to a centralized repository. Different teams stored and accessed shared documents, audit reports, and action plans.
- Responsive customer service – On a day-to-day basis SAI360 offered clients support desks that could quickly respond to system performance issues. There was a dedicated Account Manager and Customer Success Manager who hosted monthly success meetings.
- Temperature Checks – SAI360 provided clients with information on how its customers used the product suite and what these organizations found most valuable.
- Configurable Reports – Customers could access the real-time status of their audit program through configurable reports and dashboards and integrate solutions into reporting tools.
HOW SAI360 IMPROVED THIS COMPANY’S INTERNAL AUDIT PROCESSES
Through constructive and transparent conversations with dedicated Customer Success and Account Managers, focused on what offerings made sense for the healthcare company’s internal audit team.
The key issues that originally prevented their internal audit team from being as efficient as they could be primarily revolved around communication and collaboration. SAI360’s Account Manager, along with the Customer Success Manager, focused on this priority. SAI360’s collaboration has resulted in:
- Single-Source Reporting – With SAI360, their internal team had data and audits centralized in one secure location. This allowed global team members to share best practices more easily regarding auditing and compliance.
- Auditing Automation – While the team manually inputted the audits, SAI360’s system collated information. This let team members shift focus faster than before.
- Enhanced reporting – Audits within SAI360’s system could be monitored in real-time. Now, they had access to configurable reports and dashboards. This streamlined adjustments and gave them the freedom to adapt this system company-wide.
- Robust meeting and customer service schedule – SAI360’s Account Manager and Customer Success Manager worked directly with the internal audit team. They all met each month to examine where the healthcare company was gaining or losing value with its system application.
- Quarterly planning – We worked together to see how the Audit department could benefit most from SAI360’s compliance and audit expertise.
WHAT THEY SAID REGARDING THE IMPACT ACHIEVED
From their internal audit head of operations:
“SAI360’s communication is a key feature to the relationship; especially concerning deciding which solutions in the product suite work best for his team. For both companies, a focus on efficiency has led SAI360 to share via temperature check meetings, what has worked for its other clients, what may not work for us, and where the company can find the most value.”
“SAI360 is very good at saying, from a collaborative and consultative perspective, we can offer you this piece of functionality, but knowing your business, we just don’t think you’re going to get the full benefit from it,” this individual added. “Our monthly customer success meetings are crucial to our success and SAI360 does an excellent job leading the charge with those.”
In addition, the Customer Success Manager was available as day-to-day operations issues arose. This meant double-teaming with the Account Manager to ensure success in every area.
“Our Customer Success Manager has an excellent response time, as does the service desk. They keep us well updated on their productivity and progress on day-to-day incidents. Our Customer Success Manager is our lifeline if we need to report anything. They are very quick to escalate issues internally and externally to ensure everything is running smoothly each day,” they said.
”The changes within the internal audit team brought on by this relationship are just the beginning for us. Our team is actively exploring with colleagues from the company’s other lines of defense how SAI360’s system can improve operations. Managing risk and compliance with SAI360’s help is now part of our roadmap as we work together to get the most value from the SAI360 platform,” they concluded.
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