Global Life Sciences Giant’s Digital SAP Transformation Provides Operational Improvements

Over the course of a multi-year digital transformation, this global healthcare leader embarked on an ambitious migration of its complex global businesses to SAP S/4HANA and a suite of supporting enterprise finance, data, and integration capabilities. This strategic initiative aimed to unify disparate systems, streamline business processes, and strengthen compliance across the organization’s global footprint. Protiviti played an integral role throughout this journey, providing risk-based review support, partnering closely with both operations, technology, and risk teams, to deliver measurable improvements in governance, risk management, and operational efficiency.

Deep dives uncover opportunities

Protiviti’s involvement spanned every phase of the transformation as our team worked alongside global risk and governance teams to evaluate readiness for SAP S/4HANA and other major system deployments. Through targeted risk-based reviews, we identified critical gaps in legacy processes, data quality, and control environments. These findings were documented in detailed risk registers, and actionable mitigation strategies were developed, reducing pre-launch risk exposure.

As the SAP transformation initiative progressed through multiple go-lives, Protiviti performed embedded and pre-implementation support reviews for major deployments. These reviews ensured that robust governance structures and risk mitigation strategies were in place before system go-lives. By leveraging transformation assurance mechanisms, we delivered timely status reports, milestone reviews, and issue tracking, enabling senior management to anticipate challenges and pivot strategies as needed. The reviews ensured the effectiveness of controls and identified opportunities for continuous improvement, resulting in a reduction in audit findings year-over-year.

Collaboration delivers success

A key component of Protiviti’s work was its close partnership with the client’s global compliance team, senior management, and key business and IT leaders. Protiviti facilitated working sessions to evaluate the appropriateness of future state process and system designs, helping ensure alignment with compliance requirements and leading practices. Through detailed gap analyses, areas where controls could be strengthened were identified, and actionable recommendations were provided to address these vulnerabilities. This collaborative approach supported more consistent control design and execution, enhanced audit readiness, and improved confidence in the organization’s postimplementation control environment.

Strengthening interface controls

Protiviti identified inconsistencies in how interface controls were designed, documented, and tested across the SAP transformation program. Our review highlighted over‑reliance on error handling as the primary control mechanism, gaps in documenting critical interface scenarios, and inconsistencies between documented procedures and actual testing practices. By identifying these issues early, Protiviti helped management strengthen interface control design, improve transparency over testing and ownership, and enhance confidence that data transfers operate as intended – ultimately supporting more reliable downstream processing and reducing financial and operational risk.

Data migration – a cornerstone of success

Data migration was a cornerstone of the transformation, involving rigorous data cleansing, mapping, and validation. Protiviti identified opportunities to strengthen data migration governance, documentation, and evidence of completeness and accuracy across the SAP transformation program. Our involvement identified inconsistencies in how data objects were documented, how reconciliations were performed and retained, and how migration status and quality reviews were tracked. By surfacing these issues, Protiviti helped management enhance end‑to‑end visibility into the data migration process, reinforce reconciliation and quality review discipline, and improve confidence that critical data was migrated accurately and completely, which reduced the likelihood of post‑implementation data issues and supported overall program stability.

The lasting impact

This SAP transformation highlights the value of integrating risk, governance, and control considerations into large‑scale digital change. By applying risk‑based oversight and maintaining close alignment with audit, compliance, and business stakeholders throughout the SAP S/4HANA journey, the organization strengthened governance, reduced implementation risk, and improved confidence in critical data and system integrity. Protiviti’s sustained involvement enabled earlier identification and resolution of issues, more consistent control execution, and stronger audit outcomes, positioning the organization with a scalable and resilient foundation to support continued innovation and global growth.