Sidebar: Another Flavor

Computerworld - While some companies have double dipped on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts to squeeze out additional business benefits, others have taken the opposite route: leveraging previous or unrelated software investments to address Section 404.
Fairchild Semiconductor
In August, Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc. installed software from MetricStream Inc. to help it streamline and improve its quality-related business processes. Fairchild has operations and plants around the world, from Malaysia to Germany, and it wanted to ensure commonality among the business processes in place at its various locations. For example, it was looking for a standard way of handling customer returns from a quality control standpoint, says Mark Rioux, vice president of global quality and reliability at the South Portland, Maine-based company.
The Web-based software should help Fairchild reduce the time required for customer transactions, in part by handling customer requirements more efficiently. But a byproduct of the software is that it's providing the company with auditable quality controls that will help it achieve Section 404 compliance, says Rioux.
"When we make a process change within our technology, the software allows us to detail what change is occurring, what product is going to be affected and when the change is expected to occur," he adds.
Vintage Petroleum
Vintage Petroleum Inc. in Tulsa, Okla., began using Open Text Corp.'s LiveLink software in its accounts payable department in 2001 to scan and track invoices that might otherwise get buried under the paperwork for the company's engineers, says Carrie Daigle, a network analyst at the independent oil and gas company.
But LiveLink, which runs on one of the company's Windows 2000 servers, also provides an audit trail for the accounting department to show when a payment for an invoice has been approved and by whom. That's the kind of control that external auditors look for companies to demonstrate as part of their Section 404 compliance activities.
American Standard Cos.
In June 2004, American Standard Cos. in Piscataway, N.J., installed a system called the SAP Compliance Calibrator from Virsa Systems Inc. in Fremont, Calif.
The software was intended to ensure that the 5,000-plus global users of the company's SAP ERP system had appropriate segregation of duties, says Johann Erasmus, manager of quality and process improvement for American Standard's internal audit team. The software enables employees who use the SAP system to access only those functions that are pertinent to their roles, says Erasmus. "It makes the process a lot less risky," he says.
But the system also helps the plumbing fixture and faucet manufacturer comply with Sarbanes-Oxley because itputs effective security controls in place for its financial and transaction systems.