Case Study: Public Manufacturing Company achieves $500K cost savings and global SOX efficiency with Workiva Wdesk

Wdesk Bridges Oceans for Global Sarbanes-Oxley Team

A public manufacturing company that doubled in size after two large acquisitions faced a complex SOX compliance challenge: dozens of key controls across global offices, paper-based supporting documents, and a reliance on Word and Excel that forced the internal audit manager to travel frequently. Firewall restrictions and the risk of manually rekeying data made on‑premise solutions impractical, so the team needed a cloud-based, easy-to-adopt platform that could standardize processes across locations.

The company implemented Workiva Wdesk—an intuitive, cloud solution that took about 30 minutes to train external consultants and uses roughly 50 licenses for SOX testing and SOX 302 questionnaires. Wdesk’s Certification automates reminders and consolidates responses, linking data across documents and enabling evidence management with controlled permissions for cross‑border confidentiality. The change eliminated $500,000 in expected external staffing costs, cut travel and manual tracking, improved timeliness and oversight, and boosted CFO and audit‑committee confidence.