How Darling Ingredients Seamlessly Collaborates Across SOX, Audit, & Compliance Teams

In our Spotlight on Success series, Stephen Weintraub, Director of Global IT Audit at Darling Ingredients, discusses how AuditBoard helped facilitate effective cross-departmental collaboration and team-wide communications as their company grew. Founded in the 1800s, Darling Ingredients began as “the original recycler,” collecting and reusing material from food processing plants and restaurants. Today, the global rendering company has grown through acquisitions to encompass over 200 processing plants around the world. Hear how Global IT Audit at Darling Ingredients achieved workflow improvements during a time of team expansion, including:

• Using AuditBoard’s CrossComply, OpsAudit, and SOXHUB modules to create cross-departmental efficiencies.
• Leveraging administrator capabilities to configure the platform to fit changing needs as the company grew.
• Maintaining continuity across a global team by centralizing information in a single source of truth.

Tell us a little about Darling Ingredients and your team.

“Darling Ingredients has over 10,000 employees across five continents. My roles and responsibilities are to minimize risk from an IT perspective as we grow through acquisitions and as our infrastructure changes and evolves. We are a centralized internal audit team based in Irving, Texas. My group is a team of five, including two auditors in the Netherlands, and is part of a global Internal Audit team of 17.”

What were some of your challenges working in a manual environment before implementing AuditBoard?

“When I started at Darling Ingredients in 2012, IT audit was fully outsourced and SOX was managed with spreadsheets. I realized pretty quickly that we needed a solution for internal audit as we grew — and we have quadrupled in size since I started. When it was just me, managing SOX with spreadsheets and reporting to directors and the audit committee was pretty easy. As Darling became more global, we had to think about effective communication, reporting, and making sure that all teams were on the same page — and we really needed a solution to pull everything in.”

What led you to select AuditBoard as a solution?

“I knew about AuditBoard, and I knew how good SOXHUB was. When I sat down for a demo,  we appreciated the ability to pull in all the information we capture from an audit perspective, including Sarbanes-Oxley, other compliance issues, and operational audits. We also liked that AuditBoard takes user feedback and continues to improve the application.”

What efficiencies have you found since implementing AuditBoard?

“The biggest ROI from using AuditBoard is overall efficiencies gained, and everyone being on the same page. We are more efficient with our resources and we’re able to bring in management with AuditBoard’s dashboarding. Now we use AuditBoard for pretty much everything.”

How has AuditBoard’s configurability made it easier to manage IT audit at a growing company?

“My favorite AuditBoard feature is the ease of use as an administrator. We are able to customize fields and change them on a whim. We are able to add entities and align them to controls. The overall efficiency as an admin is being able to do things myself and not having to go to the vendor and wait for a ticket to be resolved. We’re able to resolve things ourselves!“

What benefits have you seen from leveraging multiple modules together across teams?

“When I came on at Darling, we stopped outsourcing IT Audit and it was just me. It’s not just my department that uses AuditBoard now. Communication and collaboration have improved between departments with AuditBoard, because IT Compliance uses CrossComply and IT Audit uses the OpsAudit and SOXHUB modules. We’re able to report collectively and leverage each other’s work. It helps us to be more efficient because we have visibility into each other’s modules across the platform.  It just makes everything easier.”

Any closing thoughts about your overall experience with AuditBoard?

“One thing I learned early on is that AuditBoard is a tool built by auditors. When you look at all the other tools out there, they are built by development companies that don’t live in the auditing world. With AuditBoard, a lot of the things that we would be asking for, they’re already rolling out because they think like us. For others that are considering using AuditBoard, I would say that it’s beneficial to purchase a tool that is built by the people that are using it.”