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Revue Audit Interne journal – June 2008
Life at Auchan is changing … for internal audit!
(…) At Auchan, internal audit is decentralized, multilingual and closely related to the company’s multiple businesses. We have audit teams in almost all of the countries where we operate and dedicated auditors for each line of business. A Corporate Audit team is responsible for overall consistency.
In total, 85 auditors, representing 9 different nationalities carry out audits in a variety of domains including store operations, logistics, finance, information systems, purchasing, human resources, banking business, commercial real estate management, etc. The primary purpose of our audits is to monitor compliance, but in recent years we have been performing an increasing number of advisory missions. (…)
To increase its impact, Auchan's internal audit team has gradually equipped itself with tools that are customized to its needs and take the company culture into account. (…)
For several years, the Auchan group has used a self-assessment approach in the internal control function to measure the implementation and relevance of its control points in relation to the risks to be covered. In 2006, upon the initiative of the Corporate Audit group, a commercially available software application was selected to collect all control points together, within a single database, and provide us with a comprehensive view of the situation, subsidiary by subsidiary and site by site: Internal Control (vendor: Enablon). The advantages of the tool we selected are the ease of use, the fully web-based architecture with nothing to be installed on individual workstations, the decentralized administration and the multilingual capabilities: all alphabets used at Auchan are available, including Chinese pictograms. The language point was crucial for us as the initial targeted users are operational staff who very often only speak their native language. To promote the tool internally, we called it B@SICS : Best practices and ASsessment of Internal ControlS.
Internal audit also acquired another multilingual tool from the same vendor to control our audits, monitor the implementation of our recommendations, create a real knowledge base and ensure consistency with the previously installed module. The reference data is shared between the modules using a tree structure for subsidiaries and sites, processes and risks and there is also a common vocabulary. This allows us to constantly enhance the risk mapping between self-assessments on internal control, internal auditors' opinions and incidents raised. (…)
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