Regulatory & Compliance - Managing ERP Changes
Regulatory & Compliance - Advantage 7 - Compliance Monitoring
VITA™ regulatory advantage #7: Changing business rules tied to compliance monitoring
Nowhere are there more challenges on the auditing side than those connected to compliance monitoring. The VITA architecture enables compliance conformity changes to be carried out by business users at the GUI level. Authorized users can adjust workflow models easily with the VITA graphical process model, to set up new steps and to add or adjust rules. The change could be tied to financial “values” or “process steps” and is easily performed by Agresso users without IT intervention.
Agresso customer Cegeka, a mid-sized IT Services firm based in Belgium, provides a great example of this. Cegeka needed to respond to a new compliance requirement involving a pollution tax on cars, since 90 percent of Cegeka’s 700 full-time employees have company cars. Prior to the change, company cars were only taxed based on commercial value in relation to private use, but the new pollution tax introduced a dependence upon the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Clearly Cegeka had to make considerable changes to meet this new legislation and to prove compliance. They needed to analyse fuel consumption for every driver, which was dependent on size, weight, and annual distance driven, and so on. To do this, Cegeka needed to change the type of data captured (the information model), when and how the data was captured (business processes) and how it needed to be analysed and reported (delivery model).
Despite the potentially wide impact of these changes, VITA’s capabilities allowed Cegeka’s finance department to make the changes in less than 10 minutes with no cost or IT intervention.
Regulatory & Compliance - Advantage 8 - Financial Consolidation
VITA™ regulatory advantage #8: Changing financial consolidation data
Unlike some competitive systems, Agresso provides financial consolidation seamlessly within its solution set. In addition changes made to add or subtract data can be performed simply at the GUI level by adjusting existing consolidation trees to add or subtract new clients, product lines, change associate company status, etc. Business and financial users can establish and perform intercompany transactions, eliminations, etc., using simple “trigger” rules. For Agresso’s competitors, changes in this area must be done at the applications programming level, which takes time and often significant external cost.
Regulatory & Compliance - Conclusion
Conclusion
In summary, Agresso’s VITA architecture delivers ongoing post-implementation agility – the ability for business users to quickly and cost-effectively make unlimited but controlled changes to their business operations after the Agresso solution is installed and in use. This is because the data, business process and delivery methodology (reporting and analysis) are intelligently tied together and synchronized, making the process simple, quick and efficient. More importantly, thanks to VITA changes to support regulatory requirements are typically made at the graphical user interface (GUI) level, by business users with little or no IT intervention. With Agresso’s VITA architecture, dynamic organizations can now cut or re-allocate the often enormous IT budgets put aside each year to pay for modifications to their software infrastructure to accommodate changes in regulations and compliance requirements.