Cutting IT Support Costs Through Redesign

Imperial Brands, one of the largest tobacco products companies in the world, saw an opportunity to reduce fraud risk and third-party IT costs by closing a gap in its segregation of duties (SoD) compliance. The gap become apparent when its auditors reported discrepancies between the company’s SoD audits and the SoD results coming from external audit. The company decided to update its processes and SoD ruleset to improve transparency of its reporting.

The SoD update revealed that its existing role-based access design was outdated as well, so it undertook a redesign of its role-based access profiles to avoid a conflict with the new SoD ruleset. Imperial Brands used the data analysis provided by SAP Access Control to identify unused or infrequently used transaction codes. The company trimmed the number of T codes and ensured task roles aligned to SoD functions defined in its ruleset. As a result, Imperial Brands was able to reduce SoD conflicts by 75% and cut its IT support costs by 70%.

For the SoD ruleset update and role-based access redesign, Imperial Brands worked with Turnkey Consulting, which designed and built new roles and provided scripting and mass maintenance tools to accelerate project delivery. The company has completed the role-based access redesign at its main operations in Europe and is working on deploying the new design principles within the rest of its SAP estate.

Read this article and learn:

How Imperial Brands reduced costs, improved security, and enhanced accountability through a role-based access redesign project.

How Imperial Brands used data analytics generated by SAP Access Control to cut the number of T codes and ensure task roles were aligned to SoD functions.

The importance of putting business owners in charge of user provisioning decisions.