Specialist South African management advisory firm, Barnstone, has introduced to the local market Oversight Systems - a new, internationally proven offering that will radically change the business process status quo for many companies.
Oversight Systems monitors transactions across a number of key predefined financial and business processes, including Procure to Pay, General Ledger (including Manual Journal Entries), Travel & Expenses, Order to Cash and Payroll. The solution can also, however, be tailored to meet any specific analytical needs.
The purpose of the system is to detect and prevent transactions that could be fraudulent, incomplete, incorrect or suspicious.
The highly automated business process systems most major companies have come to rely on, make it extremely complex to identify, resolve and track performance weak spots. From fraud to process bottlenecks to human error, digging into a high volume ERP system and identifying and resolving issues has, historically, been no easy task.
“The technology changes the cost and process efficiency context for organisations quite significantly,” says Mike Roos, director at Barnstone. “Its analytical ability is phenomenal, but it can also handle massive data sets over very short time periods. Integrity checks happen at transactional level, and the system literally runs on top of the organisational system in real-time, allowing for continuous control monitoring.”
Internationally, current users of the technology include heavy hitting brands such as Pfizer, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, the US Department of Defence and Yahoo.
A major business benefit is Oversight Systems' ability to track issues, to allocate issues to users and then track to a specific issue to resolution. Significantly, the system keeps an order trail of all exceptions and can re-test whether an issue has been resolved. This is the first solution on the local market with this sort of in-depth 'track and resolve' ability.
“The system generally pays for itself with savings achieved through identifying and resolving losses, however, its process improvement ability is equally important,” adds Roos.
“A great example is the US Navy engagement. They had 500 junior accountants analysing 10% of transactions on a sample basis. After implementing Oversight Systems, they have reduced the number of accountants working in the same capacity to 100. The key point is that now they only focus on the exceptions flagged by the system. This is a fantastic example of the cost and efficiency impact of the Oversight Systems solution.”
The Oversight Systems software sits on a separate server and has minimal impact on the existing business process system, literally 'sipping-off' data and running heavyweight analytics to identify fraud, misuse, errors, bottle necks and policy violations.
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