Approva Releases Controls Intelligence Suite™
Company introduces first and only integrated solution for optimizing both financial and IT controls, eliminating risk, identifying fraud and improving operations.
Reston, Va. (Vocus/PRWEB ) March 3, 2008 -- Approva Corporation today announced the availability of the Approva Controls Intelligence Suite, the industry’s first and only comprehensive controls intelligence solution for the enterprise. With this release, companies will now be able to assess and optimize both their financial and IT-related controls regardless of the underlying business process and supporting applications.
The new suite of products, which is powered by Approva’s BizRights® Platform and its newly embedded patent-pending PredictX™ technology, enables companies to independently and intelligently validate and monitor the effectiveness of their controls. The suite of products identifies, remediates, monitors, reports and publishes timely risk information to control owners in IT, finance, internal audit and line management roles who are responsible for managing and acting on controls information.
“PredictX technology advances Approva’s ability to detect fraud and to correlate events to a whole new level”, said Steve Elliott, CTO of Approva.
“Imagine a situation where the BizRights controls intelligence platform detects a change in application configuration settings such as a three-way match flag that ensures purchase orders, invoices and goods receipt records are consistent. PredictX technology alerts relevant business stakeholders while monitoring all of the impacted transactions to ensure that no control violations occur. The BizRights Platform correlates this chain of events and notifies the controller that this operational control has been compromised and that there is now a heightened risk of fraud. That is true controls intelligence enabled with by PredictX technology.”
Prior to the availability of this software suite, companies faced one of three difficult choices:
1. Knitting together a costly patchwork of disparate solutions and manual processes to address individual applications and controls.
2. Tolerating unnecessary risk because they were unable to cost-effectively monitor their critical controls on a regular basis.
3. Spending unnecessary time and effort to manually test controls and escalating costs of mandatory compliance and financial audits.
With the Approva Controls Intelligence Suite, companies will now be able to get an accurate and unified view into their enterprise-wide controls environment so they can reduce risk, accelerate the pace of their operations and eliminate the burden of ongoing compliance obligations. Some of the specific next-generation capabilities provided by Approva’s Controls Intelligence suite include:
- A top-down, risk-based, key-controls approach for managing IT, financial and operational controls
- Role-based access to controls information with relevant rules and reports
- The ability for end users to configure, monitor and manage the controls they own
- Support for internal and external auditors to automate control assessments
- Third-party validation and certification of controls effectiveness
“The Controls Intelligence Suite enables companies to unlock significant new value by bringing together their IT and financial controls into a single open framework,” said Prashanth “PV” Boccasam, Chairman and CEO of Approva. “Fortune 2000 Global Enterprises and their auditors must trust their IT & ERP vendors with the controls that inherently ship with their software; however they want to predictably verify the state of their controls - independently - without being beholden to the release schedule of their ERP vendor.”
Integrated Controls Intelligence Solutions Solve Business Problems
The Controls Intelligence suite is comprised of an integrated set of applications tailored to address key risks and control challenges that IT, finance and business managers face. The three main categories of controls challenges that the Controls Intelligence Suite addresses include:
Financial Controls: Finance managers can monitor the controls that materially impact the balance sheet and income statement. Specific applications are tailored to address financial reporting accuracy, cash flow and treasury management, and working capital management.
IT Controls: IT and business managers can optimize controls that govern who has access to core applications, how systems and business processes are configured, and how vendor, customer and employee data is validated and protected.
Fraud, Compliance & Audit Automation: Internal and external auditors can design controls to identify and prevent fraud, perform automated control assessments to certify adherence to compliance obligations, and monitor conformance to corporate policies and procedures.
While the Approva Controls Intelligence suite enables users to tackle discrete control issues, the true value comes from the unified view it provides into controls. Tangible business benefits include reduced fraud and risk, lower compliance and audit costs, reduced internal time and accelerated business processes resulting from the elimination of unnecessary controls.
Based on Approva’s Market-Leading Technology
Approva’s Controls Intelligence Suite is powered by the latest release of Approva’s BizRights Platform that has already delivered significant value to hundreds of companies and monitors more than 50 unique applications including SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle and JD Edwards. Version 4.0 of the BizRights Platform, which was released for general availability today (see related press release) includes the new patent-pending PredictX technology that correlates control information in the three largest areas of risk across all of your applications and processes: changes to the configuration of applications and processes, user access to applications and financial and operational transactions.
Additional new capabilities in the Approva BizRights Platform that power the Controls Intelligence Suite include an array of controls intelligence services that drive both Approva’s applications and third-party applications. Some of the services include: predictive controls monitoring, automated compensating controls, workflow-based controls certification and exception-based controls monitoring and executive reporting.
Supported by a Large Ecosystem of Partners
The Approva Controls Intelligence Suite is supported by a network of more than 30 audit, software and service partners. Approva also recently achieved a major milestone and has the industry’s largest and most expansive ecosystem of more than 1,000 Approva Certified Professionals. Three of the five largest audit and advisory firms have licensed the Controls Intelligence Suite for use in performing clients’ financial audits.
Enhances the Value of Existing IT Investments & Processes
Providing low IT cost-of-ownership was a major priority in the development of the Approva Controls Intelligence Suite. The applications leverage industry standards and technologies, making it seamless for them to monitor and integrate with related business applications. The modular design of the solutions also makes it possible for companies to control the scope of implementation projects, avoiding the need for complex company-wide deployments.
The Controls Intelligence Suite enhances the value of existing investments by enabling applications to take advantage of the controls intelligence services embedded in the BizRights Platform and by providing user-relevant real-time control information to the right stakeholder. More than a dozen related applications have been certified for the Approva BizRights Platform and are already able to take advantage of the controls intelligence services including leading third party identity management solutions, compliance documentation and enterprise risk management applications.
About Approva
Approva® Corporation is the industry-leading provider of controls intelligence software and is the industry standard for half of the Big-4 audit firms. We enable business, finance, IT and audit professionals to automate controls across SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and other legacy ERP applications. Global companies such as Bayer, DirecTV, Discovery Communications, First Advantage, Honeywell, P&G, Pratt & Whitney, Siemens and T-Mobile rely on Approva to reduce compliance risk, increase operational efficiency and flag exceptions to their business controls. Approva has certified integrations with Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM and SAP to provide a holistic GRC solution. For more information, visit www.approva.net or meet with an Approva representative at SAP+GRC in Orlando, FL, March 10-12th.
Media Contact:
Priya Ramesh
Approva
703-956-8409
priya.ramesh @ approva.net
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