Beam Global Services and SGS

Remediating Segregation of Duties and access reviews for SGS across 50+ countries

Case Study · 5 minute read · 25 April 2026

A large global finance and operations team at work

Beam Global Services led the transformation of Segregation of Duties and user access review controls at SGS for the Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash and General Ledger modules, remediating material-weakness audit findings across their global Oracle E-Business Suite ERP, in more than 50 countries.

Client: SGS S.A.
Industry: Testing, inspection & certification
Our role: SoD remediation & user access review transformation
Featuring: Oracle E-Business Suite

SGS had received material-weakness audit findings against their global Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) ERP system, spanning the Procure-to-Pay (P2P), Order-to-Cash (O2C) and General Ledger (GL) modules. Both the underlying Segregation of Duties (SoD) principles and the quarterly user access review control needed to be rebuilt to a standard auditors could rely on.

Beam led the re-implementation end to end, working with a cross-functional team across IT, Accenture Managed Services and Finance for every country in scope, more than 50 in total.

“We rebuilt Segregation of Duties as a preventative control, stopping conflicts at the point of user provisioning, not catching them after the fact.”

Beam Global Services, SoD remediation team

Situation

Material-weakness findings across a 50-country Oracle estate.

Reviewing financial controls and audit findings

A material weakness is the most serious category of audit finding. For SGS it pointed to Segregation of Duties gaps and a quarterly access review process that external auditors could not rely on for completeness and accuracy, across P2P, O2C and GL on a global Oracle E-Business Suite footprint.

Two controls had to be rebuilt in step with each other: the SoD principles that govern who can do what, and the user access review that proves access stays appropriate over time, and both had to hold up consistently across more than 50 countries.

Solution

Redesign the rules. Rebuild the review.

A Segregation of Duties control dashboard

Beam re-designed the Segregation of Duties principles for every major process area and embedded them as preventative controls in user provisioning, then rebuilt the access review control. The new model was rolled out globally with a cross-functional team spanning IT, Accenture Managed Services and Finance.

How we delivered

Project milestones

01
Segregation of Duties
- Completely re-designed the Segregation of Duties principles for all major process areas: Procure-to-Pay, Record-to-Report, Order-to-Bill and Bill-to-Cash.
- Implemented a new Segregation of Duties Matrix for Oracle Roles to embed preventative SoD controls in the user provisioning process.
- Worked with the Finance Transformation team to implement the new SoD principles globally (50+ countries).
02
User Access Review
- Revamped the user access review control after PwC (external auditor) raised red flags about the completeness and accuracy of the existing quarterly access review process.
- Led the re-implementation with a cross-functional team across IT, Accenture Managed Services and Finance for all countries in scope (50+).