How Open Dealer Exchange Achieved a Single Source of Truth with AuditBoard

In our Spotlight on Success series, Myles Gold, GRC manager at Open Dealer Exchange, shares how Open Dealer Exchange developed an environment with a single source of truth in AuditBoard to enhance visibility and boost collaboration with multiple stakeholders while benefiting from stellar customer service.

Tell us a bit about your role and your team at Open Dealer Exchange.

My name is Myles Gold. I’m the GRC manager at Open Dealer Exchange. Currently, my team is a team of four and we report to the CFO. We handle all GRC and Internal Audit related activities.

What was the breaking point in a manual environment that made you decide to seek out AuditBoard?

When I first started at Open Dealer Exchange we faced a lot of challenges from a GRC & audit perspective. We had everything in SharePoint and various sites throughout the company. We had things in Excel, which were either offline or they were online in a shared spreadsheet. SharePoint, as everyone knows, is kind of slow and not meant for GRC work, which made sharing files very hard.

Probably the biggest issue we had before we started with AuditBoard was that we would have these third-party audits where we would respond to questions — which could be up to a couple hundred. I would have to sit in a room with the CTO, the security manager, infrastructure manager and a few others for hours and just answer all these questions. 

How has AuditBoard helped your team develop an environment with a single source of truth and enhance visibility? 

The biggest thing that we wanted to get out of AuditBoard was that we wanted one centralized location for everything we did. Prior to AuditBoard we had everything in multiple spreadsheets. In AuditBoard we were able to bring everything together — from corporate risk management and TPRM to audits, controls, and issues — all in one source. 

Better yet, we’re able to produce dashboards and reports for executives and the C-level. If you’re familiar with audit shops, you know you have to be able to prove to your executives why you add value and need additional resources. In the past, I was not able to show them the value I was adding. Now, with AuditBoard and its reporting capabilities, I can clearly show how we’re helping. 

What are some of the positive outcomes you’ve seen from AuditBoard?

We were doing control testing, third party risk assessments, corporate risk management, policy management, issue management, and a SOC 1 — all within AuditBoard, and all within one year of buying the tool. We currently have around 30 people out of 180 people in our company using AuditBoard on a quarterly basis, so we have very active engagement from our customers. 

Our CTO and security manager both said that we were light-years ahead of where we were two years ago. They said there were many improvements over the last few years — we have changed a lot and I think we couldn’t have done it without AuditBoard. 

It’s so simple and so easy to use to hit the ground running. I think one of the biggest impacts of how AuditBoard helped my team and my company was the WorkStream tasks module. In the past we’d had to have all these meetings team-wide or company-wide to go over questions, controls we were testing, audits we were performing, etc. Now we simply set out a task and everyone knows to just click on the email, click on the task, fill out whatever we’re asking, and hit submit. That has saved countless hours. We’d probably need more people on my team just to be able to handle all these requests if we did not use AuditBoard. It also helped with COVID because we’re not in person and we can’t interact quite as well. Sending out a task is much easier than having 15 meetings that probably would’ve been better in person. 

Tell us about your experiences with onboarding and post-implementation support?

Another big reason why we love AuditBoard is the communication with the AuditBoard staff. Even in my personal life or work life I can say I haven’t seen any better customer service than I’ve seen in AuditBoard. When we implemented the software, our implementation lead stayed on for months after he built it and continued to answer any questions that we had. If we send them a question in the support forum they get back within three days, or if you say it’s the highest urgency they’ll get back in 24 hours.