Last Monday January 15th, TOLSON had the pleasure to host its first Club des CPOs of 2018!
Once again at the beautiful Chateauform on Rue Saint Dominique we gathered CPOs to exchange in a laidback setting on issues that are at the top of their agenda. The theme of our meeting: Purchasing and Internal Audit.
In some cases, the Internal Audit team is seen as a lever for boosting Purchasing and validating the work that it has done. In others, the Audit team is viewed with suspicion and annoyance.
To help us better understand the relationship between the two functions, TOLSON invited Jean-Michel Quilichini, SVP Internal Audit at EDF, Sylvain Rousseau SVP Audit, Risk & Internal Control of Naval Group and Patrick Colliaux from Audit and Internal Control at TOTAL.
The conclusion of all three Auditors was unanimous: the role of Audit is two-fold:
1. To guarantee transparence and compliance
2. To verify the efficiency and performance of the function
Internal Audit intervenes at the third level of control to ensure compliance and efficiency. It is equally important to note that the Audit teams serves the social interest of the company, not that of any one individual (including the CEO!).
During the roundtable session, most CPOs stated that they worked fairly well with Internal Audit. A few difficulties were identified: understanding each others jargon, too many requirements, decentralized organisation.
We concluded with two best practices to improve the relationship between the two functions:
1. Use of data mining to gather the maximum of data (helpful for both Audit and Purchasing!)
2. Preliminary work with Internal Control (different from Internal Audit!) to rationalize requirements and align
Thank you again to all who joined us and our three guests for their valuable insight.
