De Beers
The mining corporation needed to quickly become compliant with regulatory requirements and wanted to examine areas of opportunity for improvement. We uncovered duplication of efforts, noted unnecessary auditing costs, and identified automation fixes. All while making the ROI for services exceptionally worthwhile.
Overview
De Beers Mining Corporation is a multinational production entity, with primary offices in South Africa and a global employee base of over 10,000 personnel. South Africa requires companies doing business in the country to meet certain governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) requirements. De Beers wanted to go beyond auditing the company, though. It desired to increase corporate accountability; strengthen financial, strategic, and operational efficiencies; maximize performance; and better understand its enterprise risks. To avoid internal biases, the organization hired the Project Strategy Consulting Group to provide the desired insights.
Outcomes
Based on our recommendations, a series of improvement initiatives were commenced and, after eighteen months, a set of hard and soft potential benefits had been realized, including the following:
- Extraneous/duplicative staff were identified and re-tasked to attend to more value-adding efforts;
- Business processes were streamlined and/or appended to existing automation efforts which reduced some efforts’ time by over 50 percent;
- A significant reduction in fees paid to extraneous external auditors and other professional service providers through the implementation of in-house mechanisms which would ultimately provide more timely information to the executive suite;
- Decrease in risk by having a better loss prevention mechanism in place and better information regarding event-driven risks; and
- The elimination of redundant systems used across the organization’s various assurance groups.
Summary
Working closely with De Beers’ existing internal audit function, the Project Strategy Consulting Group stepped through the various aspects of the maturity model and validated items that were already planned for remediation, as well as a few significant oversights and some efforts that were either duplicative in nature or at odds with one another. For example, differing reporting requirements in separate lines of business were aggregating information in such a way that executive leaders – who thought they were comparing like items – were actually unwittingly “comparing apples to oranges” and making multimillion Rand investment decisions based on erroneous data sets. More distressingly, though, several business units of the organization were not performing their GRC functions appropriately, leaving the company open to unnecessary liability.
