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Friday, July 02, 2004

Better Corporate Governance with Oracle Internal Controls Manager

This post discusses the Oracle Internal Controls Manager, a new product by Oracle that is intended to help organisations meet the requirements of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 and International Accounting Standards (IAS).

Product Features and Capabilities

Oracle Internal Controls Manager is a comprehensive tool for executives, controllers, internal audit departments, and public accounting firms to use to document and test internal controls and monitor ongoing compliance.

The benefits of utilising the Oracle Internal Controls Manager are listed as 3 fold: -

  1. More efficient internal control testing
    • Audit Program office/project management
    • Risk assessment questionnaires
    • Confidential feedback mechanism
    • Reviewing reconciliation status of all subsystems
    • Reviewing policy compliance
  2. Higher Certainty in your Risk Assessment
    • Internal audit system is part of your operational system – this ensures accurate, real time business information.
    • Risk library and associated controls developed by Oracle working with world leaders in Audit and Risk Assurance.
  3. Lower external audit verification costs

    4. Internal control manager ensures internal & external auditors understand your business systems risks and associated controls, hence reducing time taken to understand the system and saving you money.

Installation

At this point in time the Internal Controls Manager does not even come with release 11.5.9 of Oracle E-Business Suite. After first hearing and reading about this product I e-mailed Nigel King, Senior Development Director at Oracle Corporation to find out how I could install it. He informed me that ICM is currently on control hold so that they can understand where it is being sold. I subsequently discovered that there are two minipacks available on Metalink, but you will need to have a password to access them. Because I work for an Oracle Partner I raised a TAR and explained that I would like to download the patches so that we could test this product as there were some interested clients - after doing this Oracle gave me the passwords. The patches no.‘s for product code AMW (the Oracle Internal Controls Manager Product Code) are as follows: -

  • Minipack A - 2972149
  • Minipack B - 3232451

I tried installing Mini Pack A on an 11.5.9 instance, however, the list of pre-requisites was so long and these pre-requisites also have pre-requisites! Eventually I got bored and started working on the many other things I have on my list of things to do. I’m sure I will continue this activity at some stage so I can at least be able to write a realistic assessment of the products capabilities. In the mean time I’m hoping this information will be useful to someone and would be interested to here from other parties who have actually used the product.

Additional Information

The Oracle Corporate Governance Page has a variety of presentations, white papers and videos that you can take a look at. It also mentions the high level Oracle Corporate Governance solution "slogan". According to the page "Only Oracle offers complete, integrated business intelligence and analytics that provide your management team with continuous, current, customized information about every aspect of your business-from finance and human resources to supply chain and marketing. Find out how Oracle can help you improve your business operations in the areas critical to good Corporate Governance: 

  • Visibility - Access timely, relevant, accurate information across your organization 
  • Control - Centralize and secure policies, processes, and procedures 
  • Efficiency - Roll up and reconcile data quickly and accurately while eliminating administrative overhead".

Presentations and White Papers

Posted by Richard Byrom on 07/02 at 01:30 AM
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