TeamMate+ Dimensions Helps Turn Avantor’s Internal Audit Team into Relevant Partner
With increased pressure from stakeholders and growing compliance changes, it’s becoming more critical for internal audit to evolve beyond its traditional role to assume a larger leadership position within the organization as a relevant partner.
This is the challenge that Avantor, Inc., a global supplier of high purity materials for the life sciences and advanced technology industries, was facing. Already a dynamic, global organization with operations spanning 30 counties, Avantor added additional complexity to its organization when it acquired VWR Corporation in 2017. With internal audit teams based both in the U.S. and India, as well as a co-sourced external audit firm, the acquisition of VWR required Internal Audit to bring different audit processes, practices and data together to more effectively manage its audit universe.
The merger also called attention to Internal Audit’s need to raise its level of engagement throughout the organization and develop an integrated assurance strategy. Already a TeamMate customer, ongoing discussions with their TeamMate account representative about the need for a combined assurance tool led to the decision that the additional capabilities of TeamMate+, Wolters Kluwer’s fully configurable, web-based audit and assurance management expert solution, better met their long-term goals. Avantor implemented TeamMate+ in September 2018.
With TeamMate+, Avantor’s internal audit department has turned its auditing function into a strategic asset by strengthening its partnerships with stakeholders. Using Dimensions, Wolters Kluwer’s powerful proprietary technology, Internal Audit can efficiently analyze its work and report to the varying needs of its different constituents. By establishing dimensions (e.g. organizational hierarchy, financial statement accounts or operational processes), Internal Audit can slice any piece of information, such as a risk, by the lens of the stakeholder for deeper impact. A dimension may also be defined to align with a control framework, such as COSO. According to CJ Brooks, a senior auditor at Avantor, the Dimensions feature helps Internal Audit focus on what’s important to their organization. For example:
- Avantor’s executives are interested in viewing issues by region to understand their coverage across the world. To quickly access this information, Internal Audit created a dimension specifically for regions that can be tagged against issues across the organizational hierarchy for monthly reporting to executives.
