A global telecom company looks ahead

A few years ago, a large telecommunications company was chasing the clock with its end-of-year Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) requirements. For anyone who’s ever dealt with SOX compliance, this is neither uncommon nor surprising. But the deadline was looming, and they were still staring at a mountain of work.

The company’s controller had worked with RSM US LLP in the past, and he reached out in hopes it could pull an 11^th-hour rabbit out of its hat. RSM accepted the challenge and deployed some of its specialists who had lived and breathed challenging year-end environments. Within days, the team of professionals was onsite, integrating into the telecom company’s staff, providing project management, and ultimately scaling the mountain of SOX work.

Fast-forward a few months, and the telecom company’s management team asked RSM if it would be interested in bidding on their outsourced internal audit and SOX work. They explained to RSM that they wanted to rethink the way they were conducting their program. RSM drew on its firsthand experience and presented a proposal that tackled the telecom company’s greatest business challenges through internal audit. Up against the Big Four and other middle market competitors, RSM won the bid.

A new way of thinking

Part of RSM’s winning proposal was addressing the telecom company’s impending implementation of new systems. The company was embarking on some major technology transformations—including new Salesforce CRM and Oracle Cloud ERP solutions—and RSM proposed their internal audit function be a critical part of those changes.

RSM proposed deploying internal audit– and risk management–related resources with technical skills in the technologies the telecom company was adopting and offered to work directly with the company as it went through those major infrastructure changes.

For the next two years, RSM continued to perform its more traditional internal audit function, physically embedded with the telecom company and handling its SOX compliance. However, it was the more forward-thinking, dynamic usage of internal audit in the two system implementations that commanded the most time and attention. RSM’s internal audit team—now including Salesforce and Oracle team members brought on from RSM’s deep bench of specialists—helped the telecom company identify significant technical improvement opportunities to mitigate risk across those system implementations. This agile mindset laid the groundwork for the telecom company’s greatest internal audit success yet.

Putting theory into practice

After working with the company to de-risk the two major technology upgrades, the RSM internal audit team sat down with the telecom company’s stakeholders to conduct risk assessment interviews and map out new initiatives. The goal was to continue this forward-looking approach, preemptively managing risk and adding strategic value in less-typical internal audit areas.

The internal audit team talked with the president of the telecom company’s commercial aviation division, and he expressed interest in restructuring his sales organization, growing top-line revenue, and optimizing a new system. The RSM team saw an opportunity to add value, suggesting it bring in team members who specialize in best practices for a highly functional sales organization and conduct an internal audit project of their sales process.

RSM proceeded to identify the technical skill sets needed for the project and to determine if additional resources should be added from RSM’s other consulting teams or firm-wide practice. Team members who specialize in Salesforce, as well as consultants with experience helping companies improve sales organizations, were brought in. Now the identified skill sets were met, and the project team was ready.

Adding value through internal audit

The new internal audit project team conducted extensive interviews with the sales organization members responsible for managing Salesforce to understand how they were adopting processes and configurations within the system. The goal was also to learn how the incentive plan was motivating sales personnel to drive objectives, targets, and growth.

Leveraging this new information, RSM’s project team was able to identify opportunities for operational improvement aligned with the company’s sales and customer engagement processes and controls. It found measurable steps the company could take to address risk and realize operational efficiencies. Consequently, the RSM project team recommended a redesign of the commercial aviation business’ sales incentive plan to better motivate sales activity, and it advised designing process and data entry controls for adopting the Salesforce application.

As the telecom company began to follow the internal audit team’s recommendations and its own staff saw growth and success, the buy-in became complete. Personnel who might have thought of internal audit simply as outsiders looking to criticize their work suddenly witnessed firsthand the added value of the internal audit team. For some, it was a complete 180, shifting from skepticism to understanding that the RSM team could be an independent voice of reason for best practices that could allow them to do their jobs better.

A trusted relationship

Through a relationship built over a number of years working together, the global telecom company was able to leverage internal audit for forward-looking projects like major technology implementations and sales incentives programs. The success of these new internal audit-driven initiatives continues to bear fruit for the telecom company, and RSM’s internal audit partnership has become a standard bearer for the trusted advisor relationship.