PWC Partnership: PriceWaterhouseCoopers Profile at Software AG

PwC

Software AG and PwC have developed a joint solution that enables companies to become digital and mature to achieve continuous assurance. Continuous assurance is the optimized state of control in which an organization can constantly provide trust to its stakeholders about risks and compliance without losing sight of business performance and strategy execution.

Today’s organizations are finding their efforts in internal control too costly and, more and more, only beneficial to external stakeholders. Fortunately, the potential benefits of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) are unlimited in the new digitized world. With social media, mobile devices, cloud computing and big data, change will be constant. Your future value will not be measured only with last year’s financials but by your ability to adapt your business model to these technology changes in an ever-increasing environment of regulatory and social pressure. You need to become more agile.

Successful organizations can create competitive advantage through the use of new technologies in both their business models and their internal control system. Through the use of new continuous monitoring systems over risks, compliance and business performance areas, organizations can provide continuous assurance to their stakeholders through a transparent dialog and thus create trust for the future.

Digitization is a huge enabler for creating transparency and for providing trust to internal and external stakeholders at once. Software AG and PwC are partners in enabling enterprises to achieve the state of continuous assurance. Since this is an optimal state at the end of a journey, the partners provide a road map Towards Continuous Assurance (TCA).

Towards Continuous Assurance

Continuous assurance is the optimized state of control

Informed people who make informed decisions based on real-time insights. That’s what you can achieve with this solution from partner PwC and Software AG. Monitor business activity continuously and assure stakeholders of compliance at any moment through oversight and integrated reporting.

Features and Benefits

Improve both effectiveness and efficiency of risk management and control	We have a considerable repository of process and control information and so are able to assess the maturity of your organisation on most of your core business. With this information we can also assist you in improving these to match your level of ambition. Through our best practices as well as average current practices we can benchmark your current environment and advise you on improvement potential. This could include optimising efficiency from a cost perspective.
Obtain a more complete view on risks	By mining your business processes we are able to assist you in identifying any potential risks currently unknown to your organization.
In-Memory Data Management	Software AG's Terracotta In-Memory Data Management Platform (BigMemory) is used as a central in-memory store for making terabytes of data available—in real-time—to the enterprise. With BigMemory, all the RAM in enterprise servers is available for immediate data access. Big Memory delivers ultra-fast access to hundreds of terabytes of in-memory data. It’s used not only to bolster the ability to manage large data sets, but also to make those data sets instantly accessible for analysis. Insights gained from big data are a source of significant competitive advantage and enterprise profitability. Software AG’s in memory technology is extremely powerful in a heterogeneous IT landscape.
Process Automation	webMethods Business Process Management Platform (BPMS) allows organisations to develop, execute and monitor business solutions that combine process automation and workflow management capabilities. Add-on tools provide monitoring, real-time events, rules management and more.
Intelligent Business Operations (IBO)	In a world where business operations involve a multitude of systems, IBO exposes the data of the business as insight to enable intelligent action. Combining historical and real-time big data to place business events, processes and transactions in context is key to responding at the right time to impending opportunities & threats.
Process Mining	With process mining, process owners can analyze and optimize KPIs and discover relationships between KPIs, dimensions and process structures. webMethods PPM has process mining capabilities that enable you to generate an aggregated process view for each and every query dynamically, and analyze communication patterns and process behavior. Such interactive analysis lets you drill down into process behaviors as soon as KPIs (shown in the dashboard) deviate from planned values and identify the process bottlenecks that are affecting the KPI and/or KRI’s (such as lengthy processing times and high costs) directly in the automated measured process structure. You can select other dimensions at any time and get the results immediately.
Reduce cost through Automation	We partner with the world’s leading providers of governance, risk and compliance technology providers, CMS technology providers and EWRM technology providers and are able to, independently, assist you to choose the best solution for your needs as well as assist you during implementation; either through implementation support or providing quality assurance Insource your risk and control environments By assisting you in the improvement cycles of your risk and control activities, outsourcing these to PwC will be possible, allowing you to be more actively focused on your core business where assurance is provided by PwC on an ongoing basis.
Business Process Analysis	ARIS Connect and/or ARIS Design is used to document and communicate the way we work (as-is) and/or the way we would like to work (to-be). It includes the definition of the GRC master date such as risks, controls, processes, roles, application systems, etc. You can link risks and controls directly to the suitable process steps, and map them to the business context of your organizational structure, application landscape, and regulatory requirements. ARIS Connect allows involved stakeholders to ‘collaboratively’ work on risk identification and control definition in the context of the companies (strategic) objectives, regulatory requirements and business processes in a ‘facebook’-like way. It’s used to create audit plans and survey templates and the process risk simulation function enables you to simulate risk events along defined business process chains and analyze dependencies between business processes, risks, and controls. The ARIS repository can be delivered with pre-defined content (for instance the Unified Compliance Framework) being a huge accelerator in setting up the right control measures and to be immediately informed about changed law and regulations and the impact on your processes and people.
Governance, Risk & Compliance	ARIS Risk & Compliance Manager is the core GRC workflow component of the Software AG Suite. ARIS Risk & Compliance Manager includes capabilities for control testing, issue management, operational risk management, incident & loss management, policy management, audit management, survey management, sign-off management and regulatory change management.
Application Integration	webMethods Integration Platform provides a single integration backbone to connect all IT systems and application silos—from custom, mainframe and legacy apps to ERP, CRM and cloud-based systems. It’s positioned to adopt a well-planned and effective approach to application integration and gain end-to-end application visibility across all systems. WebMethods brings together a complete set of integration capabilities, including an analyst-recognized Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), messaging, adapters and monitoring.
Data Analytics / Event Processing	Preventive controls are more and more replaced or completed by detective controls. Information security and hacking activities require immediate notification, so detection and even forward looking becomes key. You simply do not know what kind of attacks to expect. This requires event processing technology with real-time monitoring and alerting. Apama allows streaming analytics and intelligent automated action on fast-moving big data. Apama analyzes event streams to identify significant events faster than ever and triggers the right response at the right time. You monitor KPIs continuously and identify event patterns, trends and exceptions right away to identify and react to important events faster than ever. Webmethods Mashzone is used to create interactive, self-service dashboards providing real-time insights into critical aspects of the business to support right decision making. The dashboard can contain specific role-based information, but it is all coming from the same source. This enables the merge of different lines of defence. It doesn’t make sense anymore if Audit will view reports what happened 3 weeks ago, they will sit shoulder to shoulder with the business reviewing detected risks and discuss mitigation.
Activity Monitoring	webMethods Optimize offers a set of technology capabilities commonly described as Activity Monitoring. Activity Monitoring gives users an overview of running business processes, providing an instant picture of the overall process performance. Users are immediately alerted to potential problems in processes and can thus identify and eliminate the problem before operations—and customers—are impacted. They get notified of process problems in real-time—before customers notice and can “save the day” by preventing revenue-impacting service problems. Financial transactions, logistics processes, and customer relationship management are all examples of areas that require fast response times for operational business. The majority of data is already obsolete after just one day. To gain a competitive edge, enterprises are increasingly deploying business models that require real-time data for ad-hoc decisions. Activity Monitoring gives users the needed real-time insights into running processes to quickly decide on what actions to take next.

Resources

Fact Sheet	Towards Continuous Assurance (TCA)
Video	Intelligent GRC by Software AG
White Paper	GRC platform

Process Performance Optimization

It may be easy to articulate what value your business delivers, but how deep is your insight into how it delivers that value? Your ERP system manages innumerable processes to facilitate the delivery of value – but are they the right processes? Perhaps. Can they be improved? Possibly. Even more critically, how can you discover the answers to these questions? And, what can you do to optimize your processes if improvement is needed?

PwC can help you answer all these questions. With more than 160 years of accrued experience in the realm of business process analysis and optimization, PriceWaterhouseCoopers brings an unparalleled wealth of understanding and insight to the challenges your organization faces. Add to that experience the power of Software AG’s Process Performance Manager (PPM) solution and PwC’s ability to help you identify and act upon opportunities for process performance optimization

Features and Benefits

Insight in process execution	Provides understanding of business processes at the actual execution level.
Optimize your processes	Continuously optimize processes end-to-end based on analysis and insights of business process execution.
Process monitoring and benchmarking	Identify best practices and specific optimization measures. Discover weaknesses and failure models within the processes. Use to compare scenarios like regions, customer groups, sales organizations or any combination of them.
Communication and organizational analysis	Reveal relationships between organizational units and employees. Display the connection between organizational structure and process execution.
Improved decision making	Conduct automatic real-time monitoring. Get real-time alerts of key SLAs and KPIs. Predict future opportunities based on historical process data. Take real-time actions based on triggers and learned behavior.
Automated process discovery	Auto generate a graphical representation of business workflows. Reconstruction of process-relevant historical transaction data from start to finish. Resulting process models are visualized.
Historical process analysis	Locate process weaknesses and remove problem causes. Analyse process Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) via interactive filter components.