News
BPM-based app automates Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
- By Rich Seeley
- August 6, 2003
Software for automating financial controls required by the new federal
regulations mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is the goal of a new
Supervisory Control Application (SCA) developed by Fuego Inc., a Dallas-based
BPM software vendor, and Deloitte & Touche LLP based in suburban Plano,
Texas.
Being marketed to retail businesses facing stricter regulation under
Sarbanes-Oxley, SCA automates the compliance process but allows for human
intervention where necessary, explained Scott Chamberlain, Fuego's CFO. It can
help to ensure compliance in areas such as manufacturers' rebates, known in the
trade as ''vendor allowances'' to retail operations, and help to provide
documentation in case of audit, he explained.
This has been a problem in the retail industry, where companies have gotten
into trouble for accounting practices relating to rebates. ''Vendor allowances
were inappropriately accounted for,'' explained Chamberlain, ''because there
wasn't any good process control, automation and enforcement of controls in
place. So what Fuego and Deloitte & Touche said was let's build a solution
template using the Business Process Management System to automate, manage and
enforce controls around vendor allowances and vendor allowance accounting.''
The Fuego software, which is 100% Java, integrates with standard ERP systems
such as SAP, and will run on any server as long as it has a Java Virtual
Machine, explained Michael Celentano, solutions architect at Fuego.
''We integrate with any ERP system,'' Celentano said. ''The way Fuego does that
is by looking at the API or standard exposed interface to those ERP systems and
then generating automatically the connectivity code necessary to communicate to
them. In the case of SAP, SAP exposes its API in a couple of different fashions,
one being a Java interface and another being a COM interface, and Fuego can work
with either one. In the case of the Java interface, we're able to look at the
Java API and discover the methods and attributes that are part of that API, and
automatically generate the code necessary to communicate to those. So as part of
the process, we're able to extract data from SAP and enter data into SAP.''
Many observers see Sarbanes-Oxley driving greater use of process management
software, at least in some specialized settings.
More information is available at www.fuego.com/
About the Author
Rich Seeley is Web Editor for Campus Technology.