Case Study: Leading Manufacturing Company achieves streamlined SOX compliance and IPO readiness with Workiva (Wdesk)

Getting in the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Mindset for an IPO

A growing manufacturing company preparing for an IPO faced SOX challenges after its first year of compliance: teams relied on a shared drive of Word and Excel files, suffered version-control problems, and couldn’t access documents in use. Already using Wdesk for SEC reporting, the corporate controller evaluated and adopted Wdesk’s SOX solution in 2014 after seeing how linking could bring text and numeric consistency across documents.

By centralizing source links and letting process owners update a single master document in Wdesk, the team enabled real‑time collaboration, eliminated manual status updates to auditors, and automated consistency across narratives and financials. The result was stronger auditor confidence and relationships, time and cost savings, improved documentation integrity, and plans to expand Wdesk use to quarterly flux analysis.