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When Jae Kyung Gianelloni accepted a job at Caesars Entertainment as Director of Performance Assurance in the internal audit department in 2017, she knew she had a lot of work to do.
The company was still running what Gianelloni describes as a “compliance-focused internal audit shop,” and the board and senior management, along with a new chief audit executive, wanted to advance the internal audit process to become more risk-focused and capable of reacting quickly to emerging risks. As the person in charge of internal audit transformation and innovation, Gianelloni knew she would play a key role in the journey.
“We wanted to take internal audit to the next level, to act as a strategic business partner and trusted advisor, and to add more value to the company,” says Gianelloni. “We knew where we wanted to go, but how do we get there? What strategy should we use? What initiatives are we going to unfold first, and how do we execute them? Those are the questions we had to answer,” she adds.
A Global Risk Assessment
To start, Caesars’ internal audit leaders conducted a robust and comprehensive global risk assessment to establish a better understanding of the company’s risk profile. Using the insights gleaned from the risk assessment, the internal audit team then developed a risk-based audit plan for the organization, which Gianelloni says was very well received by senior management and the board.
The plan contained audits that the company had never done before, such as marketing and human resources audits. The plan featured, for example, a marketing spend analysis, which is a critical function for a large consumer-facing brand in a competitive space, as well a closer look at the process for using coupons in marketing. “We spend so much money on marketing, so we needed a better idea of where it was going. Is our marketing working? What is the return on investment? We wanted to have a better understanding of how effective our marketing efforts were, and this was a way to extend the value of internal audit to the organization beyond the traditional audit and controls review,” explains Gianelloni.
While the new risk assessment process and resulting risk-based audit plan was a big success, internal audit leaders at Caesars were now presented with two new challenges. The first was that the new plan was so comprehensive that it couldn’t be accomplished in a reasonable time frame with existing resources; the team would have to find a way to work faster and more efficiently. The second was that the annual internal audit plan wasn’t as dynamic as it could be. Risks were changing quickly, and they needed a better way to adapt and evolve the plan over the course of the year, as needed.
“We wanted to take internal audit to the next level, to act as a strategic business partner and trusted advisor, and to add more value to the company.”
—Jae Kyung Gianelloni, Director of Performance Assurance, Caesars Entertainment
One of the biggest contributors to those issues was that the Caesars internal audit team used mostly Microsoft tools—such as Excel, Word, and PowerPoint—to complete the audits and communicate results. With everything shared in a common drive, there were version control issues and, says Gianelloni, “It was almost impossible to find the current status of a particular audit at any given time.”
Finding a Better Way
Facing efficiency needs and problems with the current audit process, internal audit leadership at Caesars knew they needed to find a better way of doing things. They made some process changes, such as requiring team members to update the status on their projects each month, but it wasn’t enough. “We wanted to have a system that would give us a huge efficiency boost, so we started looking for an audit management system,” says Gianelloni.
With the support of senior management and the board, Caesars set out on a rigorous vetting process to evaluate and test-drive internal audit management systems. The audit management system they chose needed to:
- Provide consistent, streamlined reporting
- Organize internal audit workflow and provide real-time status updates
- Work in an intuitive and user-friendly way
- Come with the backing of a reputable brand with unquestioned quality and industry longevity
- Offer plenty of support during the implementation and training phases
- Have the flexibility and capability to support internal audit’s transformation into a strategic business function
With input from senior management and the IT department, Caesars’ audit leaders took six months to evaluate their options and vetted more than six major providers.
In the end, Caesars chose TeamMate+, Wolters Kluwer’s fully configurable, web-based audit and assurance management expert solution. The solution fit the key criteria the organization was looking to leverage. There was another aspect that also tipped the scales to TeamMate+. Several members of the internal audit team had previous experience with the service and tools from Wolters Kluwer TeamMate and their feedback was extremely positive.
Bringing Efficiency to Audit
After securing approval and funding, Caesars began the implementation process last January and went live with the audit system in July. TeamMate+ experts provided end-user training for all of Caesars’ 120 internal audit staff members, as well as more advanced training for 12 TeamMate+ “champions,” who become in-house experts and can help train other users on the advanced features of the system.
“It’s about finding the right processes and automating them. TeamMate+ is going to be part of that solution for a long time to come.”
—Jae Kyung Gianelloni, Caesars Entertainment
Even though it is early in the implementation of TeamMate+, it is already starting to pay dividends. “What I like about TeamMate+ is that everything is all in one place, so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between different applications or modules,” says Gianelloni. “I also no longer need to sell the importance of the global risk assessment too hard, because it’s already built into the system and is now part of our audit methodology.”
Another feature of TeamMate+ that Gianelloni credits with driving efficiency is Dimensions, which organizes the data into different views without disrupting the overall picture. She says it allows the internal audit team to create tailored reports and deliver meaningful insights to various business stakeholders without having to redo or rerun reports for each constituency, which is a significant time saver. This allows the audit team to utilize the data it needs for its core work, but serve up the information aligned to the needs of each business constituency as well.
The internal audit team plans to take advantage of some of the other advanced features of TeamMate+ as it becomes more comfortable with the system. One of those is the API connection that allows auditors to export data into other systems, such as a data visualization package, that can provide a different view of the data. The API tools support a more holistic and integrated risk management approach
Gianelloni also expects the adoption of TeamMate+ to help the internal audit team move into more advanced audit techniques, such as advanced data analytics and robotic process automation. “It’s about finding the right processes and automating them. TeamMate+ is going to be part of that solution for a long time to come,” she says.
As Caesars’ internal audit team becomes more proficient with TeamMate+, Gianelloni has “no doubt” that the system will help them operate more efficiently and complete more audits faster. She plans to leverage TeamMate+ as a core component in the transformation from a pure risk-based audit team to a strategic business partner. According to Gianelloni, “We now know where we are going as an organization and TeamMate+ will play a critical role in getting us there.” 