How Altra Motion’s Internal Audit Team Leverages Tech to Get Ahead During a Crisis

“I’m Alex Chin, and I’m the Director of Internal Audit at Altra Motion, a global manufacturer of products and systems focused on power transmission and motion control — from huge brakes in mines to miniature motors for medical devices and everything in between. In terms of structure, I report to the Audit Committee chair with a dotted line to the CFO. Many of our internal audit team members joined Altra around the time I did — about a year ago, just after the company went through a transformational merger that doubled the size of our business. Double the locations, revenue, people overnight — internal audit needed to grow to keep pace!”

“On the business side, we have over fifty manufacturing sites globally with a fairly sizable presence in China, so we’ve been dealing with this since February. We very quickly formed a Pandemic Response Team whose primary focus is to help ensure the health and safety of our over 9,000 employees around the world. At the same time, we also created a Business Continuity Task Force to assist in supporting the demands of our customers and working closely with our suppliers to help mitigate potential disruptions in the supply chain. Many of the markets that we serve have been deemed essential by federal and local governments, and we have been working hard to support our customers in sectors such as medical, agriculture, and energy.”

“I’ve had a weekly check-in call with our CFO ever since we started working remotely. During the first few calls he was reaching out to every department with a standard checklist about how the team was managing the transition to working remotely. I let my team members speak first, and everyone said that they felt well set up to audit from anywhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s the corporate office, a satellite office in China, or my dining room table — everything we need to access is in AuditBoard or in our shared files.”

“For most of 2019, AuditBoard was used just by the internal audit group, but at the end of 2019 we started to open it up to other areas of the business. Our corporate finance team was looking for a better way to obtain representation letters from the business units all over the world. We leveraged WorkStream to automate sending and obtaining these rep letters from our business units without a hitch.”

“The scope of what we’ve done has expanded with having AuditBoard to streamline the administrative tasks that used to take up huge amounts of time. Now we have the flexibility to react quickly to situations that come up like the pandemic, where otherwise we might have been struggling just to figure out how to work from home. Implementing AuditBoard has really been a win-win-win all the way around.”