BCBusiness

February 2017 Game Changer

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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somebody is submitting really o travel and expense claims. If you have a continuous moni- toring program around that, you can spot something when it comes in that's way out of left eld. That's the best way to safeguard and prevent. Maybe 10 per cent of our customers do that. A lot of them do it ad hoc, which is after something's already happened, and then it's like this massive haystack. Your role at ACL is change management. What needed to change? Like many companies that get to this point of size and age, you can stop growing at the pace you want. You can get locked into certain patterns of behaviours, maybe selling the same kinds of solutions to the same kinds of customers at the same kinds of business models so you get a bit trapped in your own success. For us the catalyst was how do you unleash that? How do you restart this business? How do we get back to some of that entre- preneurial DNA that Harald and Hart had at the beginning? For the better part of the last ve years, we've been in this kind of re-startup mode. What sort of changes have you made? I'll give you three really big ones. The rst one is talent. Over the last ve years, we've spent an enormous amount of TANYA GOEHRING; SOURCE: GLOBAL FRAUD REPORT 2015/16, COMMISSIONED BY KROLL, CARRIED OUT BY THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT FUN FACT The Women's Executive Network named Laurie Schultz one of Canada's 100 Most Powerful Women in 2016 T here have been three stages to tech veteran Laurie Schultz's career: product management, general management and now, at ACL, change management. After starting o as a product manager with Telus Corp., where she learned how to bal- ance the economics of technol- oŠy, she moved into general management, running 13 dierent prot-and-loss soft- ware businesses and managing functions from support and R&D to sales and marketing. In 2011, Schultz took over the reins of ACL from then-CEO Harald Will, whose father Hartmut (Hart) J. Will developed audit command language ( ACL) software as a professor in the accounting division of UBC's faculty of commerce in the early 1970s. Harald and Hart Will launched ACL as a com- mercial product in 1986. Now the Vancouver-based company has 14,000 customers in 140 countries around the world. In a nutshell, what does ACL do? We help stop and/or eliminate fraud, operational waste and corruption. We interrogate massive volumes of data to discover the things that are o. For example, one organiza- tion discovered 80 employees on payroll that didn't exist. We have something we call continuous monitoring. You can automate controls around things that should happen and shouldn't happen—for example, Laurie Schultz ACL Services president and CEO Laurie Schultz discusses the moose on the table, the Gran Torino in the parkade–and how to catch bad guys with auditing software by Felicity Stone THE CONVERSATION FEBRUARY 2017 BCBUSINESS 21 time growing the talent pool at ACL, and 90 per cent of people at ACL today are new to their role—about 75 per cent are new to ACL, and the remaining 15 per cent have a new role. We're really excited about the grow- ing technoloŠy talent pool in Vancouver and B.C., and there's been a huge emphasis on just surrounding that with a culture that people want to be part of, our new facility being an example. The second one is an enormous invest- ment in technoloŠy. We've increased our R&D, our product investment, by 243 per cent. We acquired a cloud-based TOP 3 METHODS OF EXPOSING FRAUD 41% 25% 31% WHISTLEBLOWER INTERNAL AUDIT EXTERNAL AUDIT OTHER

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