How Amsted Industries Cut Hundreds of Hours From Its SOX Process

In our Spotlight on Success series, Janet Joy, Executive Director and Head of Internal Audit at Amsted Industries, and Tom Osmolak, Senior Internal Auditor at Amsted Industries, share how their team leverages real-time visibility to streamline their communication with the business and deliver valuable data and insight. On Forbes’s 2021 list of the largest private companies, Amsted is a diversified manufacturer of industrial components serving the railroad, vehicular, construction, and building markets. Hear how this Chicago-headquartered team sees AuditBoard as a partner respected in the industry, as well as how the team:

• Selected AuditBoard’s SOXHUB and OpsAudit solutions because the platform was easy to use for internal audit, new members in their rotational program, and stakeholders across the business
• Saved hundreds of hours on the SOX rollover process due to time savings from configurability. 
• Streamlined communication and visibility for multiple stakeholders.

Tell us a little about Amsted Industries, and your audit team’s unique rotational management development program.

“Amsted is a diversified industrial manufacturer, predominantly in the transportation sector — rail, trucks, automotive — as well as the cooling and evaporative heat projection space. Amsted’s internal audit team is unique in that we are more of a management development program. We bring in external people — public accounting, other internal audit shops, or industry — and ultimately we find people that become leaders in our organization. They start in internal audit, but then end up in bigger and better roles elsewhere in the company.” – Janet Joy, Executive Director and Head of Internal Audit at Amsted Industries.

What was your vision for how technology could improve the way your team works with the organization? 

“One of the main things we were looking for in a software solution was ease of use — so not only our team, but also everyone within the company can use it. We have several processes within the software such as our SOX testing that has many, many people going into the software to attach documents and leave comments. We needed to find software that the entire company could use and easily understand.” – Tom Osmolak, Senior Internal Auditor at Amsted Industries 

How has AuditBoard’s configurability saved time and empowered your team to tailor your audit programs?

“One thing that stood out for AuditBoard was our ability to make edits ourselves. We’re able to go in and update a previously uploaded template if we don’t like the question anymore, or we want to add questions, or we want to do transactional testing instead of an inquiry. We don’t have to fill out a service ticket and then wait for somebody at AuditBoard to do that type of work for us. It’s a good mix. If it’s high level and complex or we just don’t have time for it, there’s an avenue to go to AuditBoard and ask for help. But a lot of day-to-day things, we can just do ourselves.” – Janet Joy, Executive Director and Head of Internal Audit at Amsted Industries.

“Another area where we’ve had a really significant win using AuditBoard is the rollover process in SOXHUB. In our previous software, when you rolled over last year’s testing it would bring forward all of the past year’s information, but there was no way to easily clean out the prior year information. In AuditBoard, all of your files are rolled over in 24 hours, and then you click which fields you want to keep and which fields you want to blank out. I can say from experience, that is hundreds of hours saved.” – Janet Joy, Executive Director and Head of Internal Audit at Amsted Industries.

How has having real-time visibility into status helped elevate the perception of internal audit with business stakeholders?

“AuditBoard has saved us a lot of time when a CFO or a head of an entity is asking, “How many findings do I have? How old are they? What is this finding?” Being able to pull that information quickly and give that to them with sufficient detail has really helped our team’s ability to communicate with our entities about information in AuditBoard and how we can fix things. It’s a huge value add.” – Tom Osmolak, Senior Internal Auditor at Amsted Industries 

How has AuditBoard fit into your larger audit ecosystem? 

“When I think about AuditBoard, I feel proud that we selected software that is supportive of all of the organizations that we’re a part of: MAPI, The Institute of Internal Auditors, the Illinois CPA Society, all of the Big Four firms rely on it for audit assistance. I’m really grateful that with AuditBoard, we picked a partner that is so highly regarded in the industry.”