（2000）Kennametal Uses ACL as Its Best Practices Tool.docVIP

Information Systems Control Journal, Volume 4, 2000 Kennametal Uses ACL as Its Best Practices Tool By Holly McMunn, CPA, CIA In this information age, security and data integrity are arguably among the most important issues facing an organization. At no time is this more apparent than when a company moves from its trusted and reliable legacy system to a new enterprise management system. At Kennametal, the audit team is playing an integral role in building trust and confidence in a newly implemented enterprise resource planning system (ERP) in the form of SAP. Taking a consultative approach, our audit responsibility has increased dramatically as we conduct post-SAP implementation audits to confirm system integrity and security. By using ACL for Windows, we have become heroes as we uncover and correct issues for our organization whose operations extend from North America and AsiaPacific to Europe and Africa. A Replacement for Panaudit and Easytrieve When Kennametal operated under its old legacy system, Panaudit was used with Easytrieve to perform audits. In 1996, when Kennametal migrated to SAP, a search began to replace these mainframe tools. Initially, we compared the Panaudit dollar unit sampling results to those obtained by ACL. Both yielded exactly the same results. To perform our test, we took one data file and ran the dollar unit sampling routines with the same parameters using each software alternative and compared the results. This instilled confidence regarding the accuracy of our inventory audit results with ACL. In addition, with its intuitive interface and ability to access and analyze data quickly, ACL proved Kennametals solution for its new system. Under our enterprise system, we have a network of NT file servers and we run Version 3.0F of SAP on an Oracle platform. To retrieve data from SAP, we run SE16 selections and download data that we then analyze using ACL. An End to Rewriting and Rerunning Reports Prior to using ACL, we would run a series of stan