| 4th August 2010, Kampala, Uganda – ACL Services Ltd., the leading global provider of business assurance technology for audit and compliance professionals, recently announced it has been included by Gartner, Inc. in the first-ever ‘Magic Quadrant for Continuous Controls Monitoring.’1 ACL was evaluated on its ability to execute and the completeness of its vision.
In Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant report, analysts French Caldwell and Paul E. Proctor emphasize the value of continuous controls monitoring technology: "Within the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) marketplace, continuous controls monitoring (CCM) is a set of technologies that assist the business in reducing business losses from fraud or failure to follow rules governing financial transactions, and improving performance through continuous monitoring (CM) and reducing the cost of auditing through continuous audit (CA) of the automated controls in ERP systems or other financial applications."2
The overall continuous controls monitoring technology space defined by Gartner in the report includes four areas: CCM for Segregation of Duties (CCM-SOD), CCM for Transactions (CCM-T), CCM for Master Data (CCM-MD) and CCM for Application Configuration (CCM-AC).
For over 20 years, ACL has provided purpose-built data analysis solutions to audit and compliance professionals. Today, ACL is the leading audit analytics technology, used by over 14,000 organizations worldwide. "We were first to market with continuous controls monitoring for transactions back in 2003," says Harald Will, ACL Services president and CEO. "Over the last seven years, hundreds of ACL customers have deployed CCM-T solutions, most often championed by Internal Audit leaders as a means to provide greater insight into the quality and transparency of business transactions. We are pleased to see Gartner now focus on the growing CCM technology space, and to be positioned as a niche player. We believe this placement acknowledges our global leadership position in audit-led transactional analysis."
Rutgers University Business School recently profiled ACL CCM-T customer Talecris Biotherapeutics in a research study, “Continuous Controls Monitoring: A Case Study with Talecris.”
"Talecris demonstrated that the close examination of business transactions underlying financial reporting uncovers unforeseen risks and potential control breaches," said Miklos A. Vasarhelyi, PhD, director of research at the CarLab (Continuous Audit and Reporting Laboratory) of the Rutgers Accounting Research Center. "Talecris' successful implementation of continuous controls monitoring from ACL is an excellent example of how audit technology can deliver critical insight that helps organizations mitigate risks, optimize business operations and assure compliance in today's real-time economy."
A growing number of ACL customers are implementing continuous monitoring across various industries, including financial services (First Hawaiian Bank, Siemens Financial Services, Inc.), healthcare (Memorial Healthcare System, Palomar Pomerado Health), transportation (Hawaiian Airlines), business services (Dun & Bradstreet), government (BC Government Ministry of Finance), telecommunications (TELUS), and manufacturing (Talecris Biotherapeutics Inc.).
"To date, ACL's audit customers have been the pioneers and leading champions for the introduction of continuous controls monitoring within their organizations," says John Verver, CA, CMC, CISA, vice president of services and product strategy at ACL Services. "It's the most effective way I know to allow management to react quickly to problems as well as monitor the overall quality of their internal controls." For more about ACL continuous monitoring solutions, go to: www.acl.com/CCM.
In Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia, ACL Services works with AH Consulting Ltd to deliver ACL solutions to clients who want to continuously monitor controls in various facets of the organization. |
