The sheer breadth and complexity of the procurement process can make maintaining effective internal controls difficult. Organizations must implement business process controls to ensure that employees only have access to SAP procurement transactions appropriate to their role and that the activity within these transactions falls in line with their established business policies. Having tightly aligned controls that prevent policy violations in the first place is critical to reducing the level of accepted risk in procurement business processes.
And this brings us to a key challenge in SAP procurement processes. Relying solely on SAP’s static role-based access controls (RBAC) has its limitations. Without the ability to consider factors beyond a user’s role and privileges, preventive controls may be impractical in certain scenarios, forcing reliance on detection and remediation in hindsight.
With the dynamic nature of procurement processes, extending your business process controls strategy to include data-centric and context-aware functionality can significantly reduce your risk exposure. Organizations using SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA can strengthen policy enforcement by leveraging dynamic, attribute-based access controls (ABAC). Pathlock extends SAP’s existing security model by enabling a fine-grain approach that shrinks the gap between business goals and security controls.
Let’s look at some specific use cases across SAP procurement transactions to demonstrate how Pathlock can reduce SAP business process risks in today’s dynamic access environment.
Purchase order creation is an important procurement transaction that should be controlled by an assigned threshold level and approval limits. Pathlock allows you to easily manage risks associated with the purchase order process by extending dynamic controls into SAP based on factors such as PO dollar amount, location, time of day, and more.
For example, let’s look at a couple of employees:
You can allow George only to create POs that do not exceed $5,000 in value. He is also blocked from creating POs outside of the corporate network. For Gracie, she has the company’s approval to create POs up to $25,000 and can do it when working remotely as long as it is during normal business hours of 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.
During the procurement business process, there is a need to control the PO’s life cycle using Segregation of Duties (SoD). That means the same person can’t perform PO creation and GR (Goods Receipt) posting followed by IR (Invoice Receipt) posting.
Segregation of Duties policies that rely on static role-based rules can create unwanted business risk because they lack visibility into attributes that define actual conflicts of interest. This gap also carries over into SoD audit logs, resulting in excessive false positives when SoD exceptions have been made.
Pathlock allows you to stop unauthorized user activity in real-time using a data-centric approach to enforce SoD controls. Our preventive SoD controls correlate user, data, and transaction attributes, along with identified SoD conflicts, to block conflicting transactions at runtime – even if they have the role-based privileges to perform the transaction.
This approach can add flexibility to procurement processes by allowing users with SoD exceptions to perform conflicting transactions that do not pose actual SoD violations while preventing those that do. The preventive SoD controls can also act as a safeguard to stop any SoD violations that may originate from privilege creep, such as a user changing roles without prompt deprovisioning of old privileges.
Because the SAP procurement process touches different departments, it’s important to ensure that users do not have access to data or transactions outside of their roles and responsibilities. From protected PII to privileged financial information – this data carries risks that organizations must address.
Alas, there are no masking capabilities available out of the box in SAP. As a result, privileged users can access sensitive data fields even when access is unnecessary. This kind of unchecked data exposure leaves a massive threat surface that is vulnerable to exploitation and leakage.
Pathlock’s Dynamic Data Masking provides SAP customers with fine-grained control over which sensitive data fields they can mask for specified users in the context of any situation. For example, you can decide to mask PII, account names, account numbers, etc., if access comes from an unmanaged device, unknown IP range, or outside typical working hours. Likewise, you can easily mask sensitive data in transactions where exposure is unnecessary for a certain role to do the task at hand.
Managing SAP procurement transactions exist in the overall category of reducing SAP business process risks. It’s a persistent challenge facing organizations of all sizes.
Contact the experts at Pathlock today to learn how we can help you face this challenge head-on with our dynamic approach to managing your SAP business process controls.
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