Company: Koç Holding A.Ş. Company background: Koç Holding, with its almost a century-long journey since 1926, has differentiated itself from competitors by achieving numerous breakthroughs in Turkey, from industrialization to globalization, playing key roles with its leading positions. The Koç Group established Turkey’s first joint stock company, created the Republic’s first industrial endeavor and first international partnership and realized the first public offering. Koç Holding is Turkey’s leading investment holding company and the Koç Group is Turkey's largest industrial and services group in terms of revenues, exports, number of employees, taxes paid and market capitalization on Borsa Istanbul. The Group has been a driving force of the Turkish economy with total sales that correspond around 9% of Turkey’s GDP and exports that comprise around 7% of Turkey’s total exports. Following 70% CAGR in consolidated net profit in the last five years, Koç Holding is the only Turkish company in Fortune Global 500. Koç Holding has leading positions with strong competitive advantages in energy, automotive, consumer durables and finance sectors, which offer strong long-term growth potential. The Koç Group manage activities according to international standards of corporate governance, customer satisfaction, sustainability and social responsibility. Today, as Turkey’s largest group of companies, the Koç Group will continue to create value for all its shareholders. Contact: Onur Taşkıner Title: Senior Audit Specialist Country: Turkey Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve? According to the studies, more than 20% of the fraudulent activities are related to procurement. We only had reactive, manual, people-dependent and highly time-consuming audit perspective regarding procurement framework, our aim was to integrate a continuous monitoring system so that we can touch all aspects of procurement processes and cover the widest area possible proactively with the help of analytical rule sets. How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them? Koç Holding decided to create a holding-wide continuous monitoring process standard and design a self-learning and self-improving continuous monitoring process. For this purpose, the SAS CMPI solution is used. Both out-of-box rules and rules from Koç Holding’s audit team experts are embedded into the system to make sure all possible areas are covered and alerts that are subject to investigation are used as a basis of further audit activities. What were the results or outcomes? Below are the critical outcomes of this innovative digital transformation project:   Koç Holding established a continuous monitoring framework for the procurement process. The holding, ensured instant fraud prevention based on performing behavioral analysis of transactions as well. Digital awareness increased in audit teams by demonstrating continuous monitoring and machine learning capabilities to be implemented to audit day-to-day business. Group companies had the chance to review and enrich their data in procure to pay lifecycle. Many manual and human-dependent tasks are automated by accumulating data and 'know-how' in the same system. Why is this approach innovative? The most innovative part of the project was moving away from a reactive auditing approach to a preventive approach. Moreover, changing the perspective from conducting an audit activity with sampling the data to being able to analyze the whole dataset with an holistic view was another innovative vision. Also, being able to roll out a standard for group companies with very different procurement practices was a challenge to overcome. ... View more