Gasunie

What was the problem?

Gasunie, a European gas infrastructure company, was one of our new assurance clients and, normally, we would examine the process structure by interviewing employees and reviewing the process descriptions the company had on hand, because it is this insight that determines the audit approach. In an organisation as large as Gasunie, it would have taken far too much time to interview the possibly dozens of stakeholders this would have involved. Moreover, there is a chance that not every variant of a process will be revealed in such a large and complex environment.

What was the solution?

By using automated data analyses, we were able to chart all of Gasunie’s processes up to the individual transaction level for the entire year being audited. We refer to this as ‘process mining’, a data-driven technique that enables auditors to get a crystal-clear picture of what actually happened instead of what should have happened. We collected data, including the digital data from the purchasing process extracted from the Enterprise Resource Planning system. Process mining software enabled us to obtain, relatively quickly, a visual illustration of information on the thousands of purchasing transactions relevant to the audit. This enabled us to see at a glance how many of Gasunie’s purchasing transactions were routed through the standard purchasing process and how many were exceptions.

What was the result?

The visual insight helped the audit of the regular purchasing translations to proceed efficiently while being able to devote additional attention to the exceptions. The process illustrations were presented to Gasunie employees at workshops. This enabled us to provide them with relevant feedback on the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes. This in turn led to several new insights about possible process optimisation. With the support of PwC, Gasunie is enthusiastically implementing process mining further in its internal operations in order to analyse and optimise more processes.

Contact us

Mona de Boer

Mona de Boer

Partner, Assurance Risk Assurance, PwC Netherlands

Tel: +31 (0)61 088 18 59

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