Lean Auditing: Driving Added Value and Efficiency in Internal Audit

1 Lean Auditing at AstraZeneca

After 15 years working in a range of finance roles, I was appointed the CAE of AstraZeneca PLC in 2002. My appointment came a few months after the enactment of the US Sarbanes–Oxley Act, following the collapses of Enron and Worldcom.

If I needed a reminder that good financial control was important, this was it. I therefore spent the first two years in my role supporting and quality assuring the embedding of Sarbanes–Oxley disciplines, whilst also working on a range of other areas in GRC and assurance as well as developing the internal audit function.

By 2005 we had made progress on a number of fronts. However, it was clear that pressure on costs would increase, and as a result my audit management team and I decided that we should engage with the cost agenda in a proactive manner: “Better to work on our efficiency and effectiveness ourselves than have someone else do it for us.”

At the suggestion of one of the Audit Directors, David Powell, we decided to work with colleagues in AstraZeneca’s manufacturing function, who specialized in lean manufacturing techniques. We contacted John Earley (now Partner, Smart Chain International), who was working in manufacturing at the time, and after obtaining some key inputs from him, we developed a number of new ways of working within the audit function.

What impressed me at first was just how quickly and cheaply the lean techniques could be implemented and the scale of the efficiency gains achieved. In later ...