Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. has a reputation for high quality and reliability, while being at the forefront of innovation and technological developments across the automotive industry. In line with Nissan’s corporate purpose, “Driving innovation to enrich people’s lives”, Nissan took bold steps to improve its governance structure in 2019. The Internal Audit team had to evolve just as rapidly to keep up with new business demands and evolving risks. The speed and complexity of these changes meant that this evolution of the global Internal Audit team had to be underpinned by technology that enriched its purpose, to protect and enhance organisational value. To that end, the technology adopted had to be scalable, flexible and easy to implement quickly.
Wolters Kluwer supported this successful transformation over six months and continues to be a trusted partner to the internal audit team.
What Nissan Internal Audit needed
Michelle Baron, Vice President / Chief Internal Audit Officer (Chief Audit Executive) at Nissan, embarked on the quest with clear objectives:
- Enable stronger team cohesion, collaboration, and consistency by moving the geographically dispersed internal audit function, comprising close to 100 internal auditors across multiple locations globally, onto the same technology platform.
- Be more transparent and agile by enabling auditors to identify issues and report them in real-time and reduce the manual labor involved in tracking management actions, while making these transparent and accessible to the executive.
- Embed quality by standardizing the internal audit practices to documentation, including the way it was recorded, so that teams could share experiences, highlight common findings, and learn from each other collaboratively. Collectively, these outcomes would drive greater performance in terms of strategic value that would be added and deliver operational productivity and efficiency gains.
