Enriching Process Models for Business Process Compliance Checking in ERP Environments

In enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments the audit of business process compliance is a complex task as audit relevant context information about the ERP system like application controls (ACs) need to be considered to derive comprehensive audit results. Current compliance checking approaches neglect such information as it is not readily available in process models. Even if ACs are automatically analysed with audit software, the results still need to be linked to related processes. By now, this linking is not methodically supported. To address this gap this paper presents a method to automatically enrich process models with audit relevant information about ACs. The method consists of three phases: process model construction, automated analysis of ACs, and model enrichment. It utilizes two existing artefacts and combines them to provide a comprehensive basis for compliance checking. Moreover, the enriched process models can support auditors in conducting process audits in ERP environments.