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BASE/SOX
The requirements of the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA) has driven compliance
issues to become an extremely important topic to
senior executives and financial organizations. The
goal of meeting this new challenge will be to have a
process that first improves corporate performance by
doing more effective planning and budgeting, and
second facilitates ongoing SOA Section 404 compliance
in order to establish a more mature control
infrastructure. SOA Section 409 of the Act requires
‘real-time issuer disclosures’ on ‘rapid and
current basis’ that may include trend and
qualitative information along with graphic
presentations. The general goals are for companies to
redefine their financial systems to achieve greater
transparency, greater individual accountability, and
faster reporting cycles.
However, differences in
business systems between internal divisions (or
between acquired companies) often work against
establishing and maintaining a common infrastructure.
In addition, the costs of process consolidation are
likely large, and possibly prohibitive, for any major
change. Companies may use workflow-enabled content
management software for process automation and
tracking, but would require the user organization to
develop and maintain the compliance process definition
capabilities. A partly automated or manual system
involving existing e-mail systems, checklists,
spreadsheets, and so on may result a low up-front
cost. However, the aggregation of such isolated
components may be far more costly — involving
considerably more staff time — and less secure over
the long run.
AcuMaestro’s business
improvement solution suite is ideally suited to offer
assistance in this situation. The solution’s core
software product, BASE (for Business Assurance
Solutions Environment) has been adapted to address
compliance management for SOA. AcuMaestro, Inc. offers
"out of the box" capabilities to support automatic real-time
SOA compliance management – BASE/SOX. BASE underpins
the processes, frameworks, business models, tools, and
governance structures that enable organizations to
define, adapt, deploy, and execute their unique
strategy. It has a powerful model based formula engine
including an open formula definition interface that
allows complex formula definition and calculation for
the correlation and aggregation of business
intelligence (BI). The BASE calculation engine
acquires information from other management systems
and/or operational environments, allowing the BASE
system to perform valuable information collaboration
that is organized both vertically and horizontally.
Specific real-time measurable components are refined
into Business Behavior Indicators (BBI) to provide an
accurate picture of the current state of the business
in sufficient detail to drill down to the individual
customer services. The collection of BBI’s is then
compared in real time against service objectives and
reporting thresholds in order to verify internal
(service and operational quality), external (with 3rd
party vendors), or customer service level commitments
and compliance with Business Performance Objectives.
With extensions to support
your specialized needs, BASE can be your valued
partner by providing up to date information revealing
the efficiency of your business and the financial
implications of your current performance levels.
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