Case Study: Sara Lee Corporation achieves significant cost savings and greater audit assurance with ACL

Acl Technology And Repeatable Analytics Provides Significant Savings To Sara Lee Internal Audit

Sara Lee International, a global consumer-products manufacturer operating a central SAP ERP across 151 entities in 25 countries, faced a decentralised control environment and limited internal-audit resources. With a 40-person audit team unable to visit most locations, audits relied on time-consuming manual sampling and delivered a low assurance-to-cost ratio.

To address this, the internal-audit team ran a 12-month pilot using ACL repeatable analytics to automate tests of SAP configuration, master data, transactions and security across full data populations. The approach cut travel and manual effort, delivered significant cost savings, increased controls assurance, produced monthly reports used by local and corporate management, and drove process and SAP configuration improvements across the organisation.

Sara Lee Corporation

Tobias Thibaut

Audit Manager