Bringing an international group under control 

Lacoste is an international brand of the MF Brands group, established in 120 countries with more than 1,200 stores, and achieving 2 billion euros in turnover. 
 
Lacoste chose Supervizor to automate its accounting controls. 

What are their impressions after more than a year of usage? 
 
Discover feedback from Frédéric Michelin, Vice-President Global Accounting at Lacoste. 

By selecting Supervizor, we wanted to strengthen our internal accounting control. Thanks to the solution, we have been able to improve our accounting practices, and errors are detected automatically.   

Frédéric Michelin, Vice-President Global Accounting at Lacoste 

Automated controls to improve accounting practices 

Launching manual checks is a complex and tedious task. Collecting data and analysing it takes considerable time. In this context, analysing 100% of your data appears impossible:

Supervizor's pre-configured controls are very numerous and very rich. They allow you to go further than a simple balance review by exhaustively scanning all accounting entries. This review could not be conducted without the use of such a technology. 
 
Thanks to the analysis of the entirety of accounting entries, Supervizor has for example made it possible to identify certain unusual transactions, which a manual method would not have made it possible to discover, without devoting an excessive amount of time to them.

But it is not a matter of making checks for the sake of making checks. Once the results have been analysed, the challenge is to identify the anomalies and their causes, in order to improve the company's practices on a daily basis. 

The checks carried out relate mainly to the quality of the data itself (accounting diagrams, lettering of accounts, role of team members, etc.). Their analysis has made it possible to change certain practices (access rights, accounting schemes), which has thus strengthened the prevention of the risk of fraud and the standardization of our accounting practices.

This is also one of our strongest convictions at Supervizor: automating the import of data and analyses will allow our customers to spend time on improving their internal procedures. 

We appreciate the availability of the Supervizor team and their commitment to developing the solution. Supervizor allows us to have more visibility on the various calculations, a better knowledge of the existing flows locally, and to define action plans following the potential identification of anomalies.

How did the implementation of the solution go? 

For the implementation of the solution, Lacoste chose to combine continuous auditing and remote auditing. A wise choice when investigative resources do not allow continuous monitoring of all subsidiaries. 

We integrated the data from SAP. Given the resources that need to be mobilized for the deployment of the solution, we defined a multi-year audit plan including: 

• Continuous audit of significant companies 
• The remote audit of other companies, organized over a period of 4 years

Automation saves considerable time when it comes to conducting the actual data analysis; this time saved makes it possible to reallocate the time of the teams to the investigation of results, and the implementation of corrective action plans, if necessary. 

Where to start? 

At Supervizor, we make sure to help our customers choose the most relevant controls that meet their specificities. 

We support our customers throughout their project to choose the most relevant controls for their organisation. Our recommendation does not necessarily amount to deploying all 300 controls available in the catalog (even if ultimately this is the choice made by our client Lacoste, based on discussions with Supervizor to co-build their implementation plan). 

For example, today Lacoste counts:

• 3 subsidiaries under continuous control, 5 to 8 different foreign subsidiaries under remote audit each year
• 5 to 8 countries under control 

• Up to 300 controls made available through tailor-made catalogs 

• Number of users: 

2 to 3 per company audited locally 

          1  to 2 people centrally 

          1 person centrally as a functional administrator 

In summary: our purpose with Supervizor is to allow our customers, by automating their controls, to devote the useful time of their teams to detailed analyses and the improvement of their accounting practices. 
 
Setting up Supervizor only takes a few weeks, and our teams are available to help you throughout the implementation process.