How A Fortune 500 Company Improved Security, Efficiency & Audit-Readiness With Pathlock 

Overview

One of our customers, a Fortune 500 company and the world’s largest pork processor and hog producer, approached us to help their teams improve efficiency and audit-readiness.

Challenge

In late 2005, the company went live on SAP SCM 4.7. With over 700 active users having access to SAP, the senior systems analyst faced the difficult task of managing employee access to the system. Specifically, granting people access to SAP to allow them to do their jobs, but at the same time making sure that there were no conflicts of interest, segregation of duties issues, and compliance rules relating to Sarbanes-Oxley were being followed. 

The company had been using a legacy system for almost 30 years and, with many small offices on the network, managers had been accustomed to granting access to users on an ad-hoc basis. After implementing SAP 4.7, the IT team was faced with two difficult tasks:

• How to understand who already had access to the system
• How to implement a role-based approach to ensure that employees were granted proper access to SAP. 

In order to identify potential conflicts and proper segregation of duties, the IT team had to manually run reports to view current access. But downloading a record of transactions and reviewing it against a matrix of employees was very labor-intensive and left the door open for errors.

Requirements

The company needed a solution that would address multiple issues:

• Segregation of duties and ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations

• Ability to easily run reports and highlight conflicts-of-interest
• Ensure that system access was granted or modified easily without hindering worker productivity

Benefits

After having used Pathlock for just a short period of time, the senior system analyst has seen a variety of benefits for the company that focus on improving efficiency and reducing the time it takes to run reports and manage user access to SAP.

“In the past, we would run SAP reports that would tell us the number of users that had logged into the system over a certain period of time. With Pathlock, we simply enter the number of days into a pre-built report to view the same information. What used to take hours now takes seconds. We are now able to supply our auditors with accurate, detailed reports they need regarding segregation of duties with the push of a button. A potential impact on productivity has been eliminated since everyone has access to the system when they need it with minimal delays.”