Efficient audit processing at scale with VantageCloud Lake

Scaling and automating efficient audit processes 

Energy and natural resources companies experience complex supply chains with many suppliers. Visibility and understanding negotiated prices, purchase orders, and invoices can impact compliance, fraud, and profitability. This is why PRIO’s audit department focuses heavily on the supply chain, which represents a significant portion of money flowing in and out of the business. 

“You usually perform the supply chain audit because it’s considered a higher risk,” says Alex Mendonça, head of internal audit at PRIO. “We need to review purchase orders, and, in the past, we usually reviewed the purchase orders only when performing an audit.”

However, without the use of artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and data, auditors are left to perform intermittent and manual reviews. Claudio Paiva, senior internal auditor at PRIO, says auditors face challenges without innovative technologies.

“Previously, auditors performed random samplings because it was not feasible for any auditor to verify the entire population of the data,” Paiva says. “We’re talking about 38,000 purchase orders and 900,000 journal entries. We have to use technology to automate as many processes as we can.”  

Trusted data delivers insights to mitigate risk 

By investing in technology, PRIO’s teams are better prepared to manage rapid business expansion of new companies that bring their own data, suppliers, and transactions. Teradata VantageCloud Lake on Azure delivers integrated and harmonized data, giving PRIO the tools and confidence to unlock insights in data that power innovation. VantageCloud Lake provides PRIO with a scalable, centralized, cloud-native analytics and data platform. 

“We were limited to analyzing sample items, equivalent to less than 100 items,” says Mendonça. “Now, with data centralized and integrated in Teradata VantageCloud Lake, we can analyze all the data we have and reduce the risk to the business.” 

Paiva emphasizes the importance in trusted data that is now made available in VantageCloud Lake. “The first step in an audit is that we have to verify the integrity and completeness of data,” he says. 

Now, automations source data from SAP through an Azure native SAP Table connector where Azure Data Factory manages data pipelines. Data is loaded into VantageCloud Lake as the analytical environment responsible for PRIO’s auditing analytics. Microsoft PowerBI dashboards are connected to the Teradata database, visualizing and contextualizing the analytical insights. The automation has removed human involvement, reducing risk and inaccuracies and accelerating time to insight at scale.  

“We used to access SAP and download the report, connect it to PowerBI, create rules, and then get the information,” says Mendonça.

Mendonça explains how dashboards are helping the entire organization. “We have to review corporate credit cards, administrative expenses, letters of attorney, accounting liabilities, and financial statements,” he says. “These all have unique PowerBI dashboards relying on the insights from Teradata that help the entire organization mitigate risk.”  

According to Paiva, PRIO “can better monitor and be alerted to potential risk or fraud. For example, POs with the same amount, same approvers, or changes to an approval chain—we’re able to capture all of that because our data is connected directly into our ERP through VantageCloud Lake. All the information has to be in VantageCloud Lake for it to be considered official. If it’s not there, it’s not official. This is why we’re confident in the data integrity and completeness and can have trust in the data in VantageCloud Lake.”