In our Spotlight on Success series, Maggie Bolin, Internal Audit Manager of Vulcan Materials, shares how her team has leveraged technology to gain significant time savings on their SOX compliance work. Headquartered in Birmingham, AL, Vulcan Materials is America’s largest producer of construction aggregates, and a major producer of aggregates-based construction materials, including asphalt and ready-mixed concrete. Hear how this team saves hundreds of hours on the SOX rollover process alone by switching from a previous tool to AuditBoard, as well as:
- Gaining efficiencies across SOX and audit by using AuditBoard’s SOXHUB and OpsAudit solutions together.
- Leveraging real-time visibility into status to boost reporting capabilities and provide an up-to-date picture of SOX completion percentage during their SOX busy season.
- Redeploying saved time to provide work/life balance for staff, as well as to audit other high-risk areas important to management.
Tell us a little about Vulcan Materials, and some of the challenges you faced with your previous audit management tool.
“I’m the Internal Audit Manager at Vulcan Materials Company. Vulcan Materials is the nation’s largest producer of construction aggregates. We own rock quarries throughout the United States and internationally, and we are also a major producer of ready mix concrete and asphalt. We perform a variety of assurance and advisory work for our company — typically financial, operational, and IT audit-related services as well as a variety of consulting services.”
“The decision to use AuditBoard was really about several issues that we were experiencing with our previous solution. The vast majority of our issues were related to losing work in the tool, lack of ease, and not being able to efficiently and quickly review workpapers.”
How has AuditBoard’s connected platform and intuitive UI enabled you to save time on your SOX processes?
“One of the great features that we like in AuditBoard is in the SOXHUB module, having your walkthrough, interim, and roll forward testing all in the same screen. That has really allowed us to work more efficiently. In our previous tool, we had to open multiple projects, access multiple screens to get to that information. Now in SOXHUB, it’s all within one click.”
“We just recently completed our SOXHUB archive process. One of the features that we elected to use is rolling forward our prior year documentation to next year. Just that feature alone is going to save us hundreds of hours this year during our SOX testing.”
How has having real-time visibility into status enabled you to boost your reporting capabilities?
“During our busy SOX season, our Vice President of Internal Audit requested a weekly update of our SOX completion percentage. Using AuditBoard, it was a very seamless process to run a report and provide an updated report to him each week. Before using AuditBoard, providing a weekly report of our SOX completion status was really not feasible due to the cost-benefit decision — it took much too much time to compare two systems and produce those reports. But now in AuditBoard, it is just a matter of minutes.”
What has your team been able to accomplish with the time saved using AuditBoard?
“With the efficiencies gained from using AuditBoard, we are able to offer our staff more work-life balance — especially when traveling in the field. Using the software is definitely saving us hours per week, and it’s allowing us to spend some of that time auditing other high-risk areas that are important to management.”
