How Marmon’s Internal Audit Team Achieves Global Collaboration
In our Spotlight on Success series, Daniel Montes, Senior Manager Internal Audit at Marmon Holdings, shares how the group’s growing global internal audit team has leveraged AuditBoard to work seamlessly together across time zones.
Hear how this Berkshire Hathaway industrial subsidiary switched from a manual, spreadsheet-driven environment to gain efficiencies and streamline operations, including:
- Coordinating to manage audits of 156 business units on four continents.
- Quadrupling the size of the audit team in two years while maturing the control environment.
- Creating a single source of record and gaining real-time visibility into worldwide issues and remediations.
Tell us about the structure and type of work performed by your audit department.
“Marmon Holdings comprises 156 business units, primarily in manufacturing, spread across the globe in India, China, and our team across the United States. The department itself has grown from four people to 19 in the last two years. As we grew the size of our department and the scope of what we were auditing, I needed a tool that would help us get away from the manual spreadsheets and storing things in separate places. From a coverage perspective, we previously had a very standard audit program — it was one size fits all. Also as we were growing we were looking to mature the control environment itself, improving control descriptions and getting more ownership from the business related to audits and issue follow-up.”
How has your audit team been able to collaborate internally as well as with the business and external stakeholders?
“The audit team finds AuditBoard very simple to use and intuitive. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. When we have new auditors join the department, we need a document to show them how to use it and how to go through the basic steps. Our team, especially the younger generation, simply starts clicking around, and they figure out the software right away.”
“We have success onboarding our stakeholders as well — they appreciate the ability to be self-sufficient. They have individual dashboards, and they get their AuditBoard summaries instead of waiting for us to send them reminders for their tasks. The same goes for our external auditors — they already know the software, so all we have to do is grant them access to the external auditor role. Best of all, they only see what they need to see based on what I have assigned them.”
“From a collaboration standpoint, it’s perfect. You can tag somebody instead of sending an email, especially when the team is in China or in India because the timing is a little bit off. It’s the same with our businesses — they don’t have to worry about working on our time, and keeping them happy is one of my big things.”
How has Marmon gained real-time visibility into issues and remediation?
“When we look at where we were and where we are now — transparency was a big thing. Before AuditBoard, to create reports was painful because you had to collect data from all over the place. People had documents saved locally, stored on shared drives, on SharePoint — it was a nightmare. Now with AuditBoard, we have visibility with a single click. The combined issues report is one of my favorites because it shows me the world and where the remediations are, who’s responsible, who’s late. That’s one of the biggest takeaways for me from a reporting standpoint.”
What ROI has Marmon achieved through the use of AuditBoard?
“From an ROI perspective, the return we gain is efficiency that allows us to increase our coverage across the entire organization — we can do more with less. It feels like our team of 19 can do the work of 30 auditors with the efficiency we gained from using AuditBoard. The gains also come from the improvements in issue tracking — not having to send emails out to multiple contacts across over 150 companies saves a massive amount of time.”
Check out more Spotlight on Success stories of transformation in audit, risk, and compliance from some of the world’s most recognizable organizations.
