Document Management Tools Patch Sox Holes

To help customers meet those needs, solution providers are offering tools to manage and monitor documents and workflows, handle electronic signatures and automate manual processes. While many integrators rely on dedicated SOX applications to accomplish these goals, others report that standard document management tools do the trick.

That's it in a nutshell. Unfortunately, navigating the internal processes of customers can be tough. "Companies are focusing on what the heck they have to do to be compliant, rather than making the process repeatable," said Sal Patalano, president and CEO of En Technologies, an IBM partner in Coral Gables, Fla. "It's shocking to me just how far behind so many companies are with compliance."

The lack of preparedness among many companies points to opportunities for the channel. Plus, solution providers say that by helping companies deal with SOX financial controls, it helps them to move up the decision-maker food chain.

For example, Image Integration Systems (IIS), Perrysburg, Ohio, has been successful courting multinational companies with annual revenue of $1 billion to $3 billion, said Ron Kelley, vice president of business development at the solution provider. "Because our whole business practice is around process improvements, mostly on the transactional side, we work with a lot of CFOs and controllers—and try to avoid like the plague going to the IT side first. Businesspeople have business issues to solve. IT people have constraints.

IIS does not have a dedicated SOX practice or even a specialized SOX application. Instead, it has gone after opportunities with its own DocuSphere Workflow and Content Manager software, which act as a bridge between PeopleSoft and SAP ERP applications and Kofax's Ascent for Capture. The combination of Kofax's document-capture capabilities with IIS' workflow application helps customers automate ERP-based processes that are still manual, Kelley said.

Solution providers agree that automating internal processes is the key to addressing the SOX market.

"Maybe there's an approval process for account reconciliation or for creating purchase orders. By automating the controls for, say, account reconciliation, you make it cheaper to perform and, more important, easier to test," said Grant Fitzwilliam, managing director of the SOX practice at systems integrator Answerthink, Miami. "This is the year companies are trying to figure out how to make Sarbanes-Oxley reports sustainable and less costly. We say you should take advantage of your ERP program to automate manual controls."

Some companies, such as KeyMark, Greenville, S.C., prefer to apply dedicated SOX software to tackle projects. Such applications are designed to help companies test their internal controls according to SOX's provisions, review those tests, find weaknesses and associate documents with the processes being tested.

KeyMark offers KeySox, a mixture of KeyMark's own software, Kofax Ascent Capture, Hyland Software's OnBase workflow engine and KeyMark's professional services. The combination sells for $50,000 to $75,000 and lets customers pull invoices and other accounting documents, test procedures against risks and record the results.

"The beautiful thing is, when the auditor comes in, he can see all of the documents that are associated with the process. That's a huge advantage," said KeyMark CEO Jim Wanner.

The solution has helped KeyMark win customers across the country. "Because of the time savings we provide, this will quickly pay for itself against the auditors," Wanner said.