Here I am writing this blog about the solution we had implemented named as Audit Management. The purpose of writing this blog is to share my experience with all of you, the hurdles that we faced while this journey and how we came out, also to help developers who are going to implement this solution, this blog might become the shows stopper for them instead of find exploring various links and gather information they can find all information here at one place.
Introduction:
SAP Audit Management is part of SAP Assurance and Compliance Software
This solution provides an end to end audit management solution. The audit department can use it to build audit plans, prepare audits, analyse relevant information, document result, form an audit opinion, communicate result, and monitor progress.
The key features of SAP Audit Management includes:
- Fully mobile enabled and easy to access on multiple devices and platforms
- Full Coverage of audit roadmap, including planning, preparation, execution, report and follow-up
- Risk based audit planning with risks pulled from SAP Risk Management system
What made us to implement Audit Management?
Many departments in organization conduct regular internal audits and inspections as part of performance improvement and internal benchmarking exercise. Initially, department used to maintain the details of audit plans, audit, its observation and recommendation in either worksheets or in word documents. As time progressed, they started getting lost in the maintenance of a centralized document for action tracking and recommendation closure. They tend to maintain various versions of the same information and hence confusion prevailed. This impacted the timely implementation of many recommendations.
Case Study:
When Risk Assurance department explained their business pains; requirement for an IT solution was felt. But, we were not sure of the platform and solution. We explored SAP solution offerings to find that SAP central component has solution called ‘Audit Management’. Subsequently, we could assess that this solution is quite flexible to not only plan and schedule audits and inspections, whether internal or external, but also has very robust mechanism of action tracking & reporting. The flexible hierarchy levels of audit objects allowed us to map all different type of auditing and inspection requirements.
Objective:
So after understanding business pain, we set our objective is to provide them a solution that not only ease them in data maintenance, but to provide them a fully-fledged solution that could help them for data management in required format, tracking for responsibilities assigned to users, calculation age to assigned activity after getting logged, send reminder to users for intimation as well as giving them a provision to navigate SAP, through outlook only.
Challenges:
Data Migration:
Before proceeding for the new entries of audit in SAP system, business wants all historical data to be in system first, so we had to explore some functionality in SAP for Batch input something like BDC but unfortunately due to dynamic behaviour of data it didn’t work and finally we came to a conclusion with ALE/IDOC.
Linear Reporting:
We were asked to generate on-demand reporting mechanism in the same format. The challenge with the format was that it has linear reporting of audit objects i.e. in the same row; it contained the details of audit, its observations, then recommendations and finally action. Further to that, it had many additional details of ageing and business defined statuses.
Reminders/Integration of SAP Objects with Outlook:
We got a requirement to integrate SAP objects with outlook, so that user didn’t need to navigate SAP transaction and they could directly access the SAP objects through outlook reminder mails only
Change Management:
So the change management was a big challenge for our functional consultant, to convince them of using SAP audit management module and get migrated from legacy environment to SAP environment.
Let’s move to developments part where I will share all the development objects that we had created for implementing this solution in details, which will help most of the developers to take a straightforward approach for implementing audit management module instead of exploring the technical feasibility of the objects.
Developments:
1st development: Linear Reporting
First requirement which we asked is to build report with information containing Audit, observation, recommendation, and action in a single line.
We had no advanced technical details available with us, which we could use to achieve business requirement, After long time spending in exploration we came to conclusion to achieve this through BAPI (Business Application Programming interface), and with all logical operations on BAPI data, we developed report with single line information.
BAPI that we had used to achieve this has mentioned below:
BAPI_BUS20370_GET_DETAIL
2nd Development: Reminder mail & Integration SAP Objects with Outlook
Second requirement we got from business is to send reminder mail for Audits and their relevant actions, for that SAP has provided one program named as PLM_AUDIT_REMINDER_01.
You can create customize program by copying above mentioned program to change the contents of mail accordingly.
To change the content of Program you need to create a dialogue text using tcode SE61, and use that name in the selection screen of program created to send reminder as highlighted in below mentioned screen shot:
When you will execute the program, above mentioned screen will get appear; in the standard text field type the name of the dialogue text created for mail content.
As you can see in above screen shot there is one section ‘Restrict the Analysis Period’, in that section Planned Start Date field directly have a relationship with To be completed by date at various levels of audit management. This program will send mail for all objects which falls under Planned Start Date field range.
To attach work item in outlook mail so that user can directly access SAP objects through outlook only by clicking on attachment, instead of navigating through SAP tcode, there is standard SAP function module named as SWN_CREATE_SHORTCUT.
Function Module to attach work item in mail: SWN_CREATE_SHORTCUT
3rd Development: BI/BW Extractor
Our next requirement is to design a BI/BW report which would track how many actions has been logged in which department, out of which how many has resolved, how many has got overdue, and how many are pending which could get identified by calculating their ageing with the completion by date.
BAPI’s that we used for building this extractor are as below:
PLM_AUDIT_ACTION_PREFETCH_M_DB
BAPI_BUS20350_GET_DETAIL: Action Details
BAPI_BUS20360_GET_DETAIL: Question List Details
BAPI_BUS20370_GET_DETAIL: Audit Detail
After all such developments it went through unit testing, user testing after getting green signal, we organized GO-Live event for Audit Management.
Roll Out:
Before getting it rolled out in all departments, it was necessary to have users review about the solution, whether it is working properly and in a manner the way business wants. Some cosmetic changes came which got concluded and it took us almost one month to get the solution stabilize.
Once we came to know we have developed a deliverable solution, it was the time to Roll out this solution in rest of the departments like Legal department, Safety department, PSM department etc.
Business Benefits:
- A centralized and yet simple solution for recording all the different Audit Plans, Audits, Inspections, Observations, Recommendations & Actions.
- All scheduled audits can be planned, approved in system now and auditors/participant will get system reminders beforehand.
- A single source of truth for all our Audit data, which otherwise was getting unmanageable from different excel sheets, word files, mails and MOMs.
- Uniformity in the capturing the Audit recommendations, observations & related nomenclatures, which otherwise were inconsistent in our records.
- All documents which are relevant for an audit can be attached for reference.
- Availability of Department / Unit/ Audit Area - wise action tracking reports for pending, due and overdue action counts, thereby enabling closed-loop action tracking mechanism
- Automated system reminders for action completion to the person responsible. Also, escalation mechanism for overdue actions to reporting manager and Auditors.
- Excel- downloadable reporting features which serves as ready-made reports for further analysis and dissemination.
I hope you will like this blog and expecting this blog will help developers which keen to implementing this solution in their organization.
Thankss….