US Firms Not Leveraging SOX Compliance Benefits
BIOS Magazine
Sep 22 2005 : Fortune 100 companies in the US will spend an average of USD 2 million on meeting Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, according to Gartner, but 85 per cent lack an official compliance budget. Most are also not using compliance initiatives as an opportunity to revamp existing processes, nor to achieve best-practice status. Ultimately, businesses have to eliminate process duplication, reduce processing costs and improve daily operations, and compliance software can assist in this endeavor while increasing business efficiency and streamlining processes for transparency.
Coordinated compliance initiatives essentially turn business processes into assets that can be reused on an enterprise-wide basis by multiple divisions for process consistency. If process discovery and modeling is undertaken, core business processes can be converted into key production applications that contribute to market success. To increase productivity and lower costs, multi-siloed business processes that support CRM, ERP and SCM functions need to be streamlined and involving the IT team will decrease business group frustrations and backlogs.
Re-engineering core processes helps enterprises continually improve efficiency and introduce real-time functions for greater business integration and agility. Structured and unstructured content flowing across disparate enterprise systems can for instance be streamlined to ensure transparency and greater visibility to end-users. Using business compliance initiatives as an opportunity to automate key processes enables enterprises to render those processes as managed assets with the help of tools that give real-time visibility into business operations.