ALICE: Your smart automation platform

Introducing ALICE™

ALICE™, powered by Grant Thornton dGTL, is an Intelligent Automation platform that governs, manages and monitors your business. ALICE™ combines artificial intelligence with cognitive capabilities to create digital services to assist those charged with governance, management and monitoring with real-time and continuous visibility into a business. She saves human effort so that it can be applied to more judgmental and higher-risk areas of business.

Deployment of the ALICE™ platform within your business is seamless. The platform is easily manageable; it is secure, scalable, system and industry-agnostic and API-enabled. Digital services are created by the ALICE™ team in a matter of days and are run remotely in an uninterrupted manner.

Introducing ALICE™ | dGTL | Grant Thornton Bharat

A solutionist

Embedded within the ALICE™ platform is scale, security, fully managed infrastructure, auditability, auto- provisioning, connectivity, real-time, continuous and/or periodic monitoring, quick and easy deployments and customisation. She can be shaped to meet your business needs or according to what problem you are solving.

A digital worker

Through her digital services, ALICE™ augments and optimises human effort by providing more coverage, more scale, more automation, more real-time and continuous monitoring, more intelligence and more value-add in a global and remote manner. She affords human effort to be applied to more judgemental and higher-risk areas of the business so that organisations can do more with the same or less.

A digital collaborator

ALICE™ integrates multiple and disparate sources of data from a wide variety of business disciplines into a cohesive and intelligent lens through which various stakeholders can have real-time insights of the business. She connects you to your business remotely allowing for uninterrupted monitoring of performance.

How can ALICE™ help:

	Where there is a need for real time/ near real time monitoring and controls. Eg: Liquidity & cash, ongoing tax liabilities, inventories.
	Focusing on fraud prevention with real time diagnostics to spot outliers, extra-ordinary transactions in relation to the past. Eg: Flag high value/ unauthenticated transactions.
	Real time analytics on large data sets. Eg: customer purchase analytics, cost of borrowing analytics.
	Ensuring the processes remains within regulatory limits. Eg: Finance process controls, trading limits, invoice management.
	Providing Data privacy and IT security assurance with processes and systems involving critical customer or business data or confidential information.

How does ALICE™ simplify things?

ALICE™ translates human logic into reusable algorithms.

Here’s how:

ALICE™ provides full-coverage over population

With technology taking over the world, assurance professionals are expected to provide full coverage over populations. ALICE™ eliminates manual labour of sample testing by activating her digital workforce, which is embedded with intelligent automation and robotic processing. This allows you to optimise routine and repetitive audit procedures by getting concise and accurate results.

ALICE™ provides better interoperability between humans and machine

ALICE™ allows you to either consume its pre-build control procedures or build your customised control procedures on its platform. This helps in getting test results quickly, which can then be visualised under default reports, dashboards and working papers. This can also be integrated into existing GRC platforms or business intelligence tools of your choice.

ALICE™ smoothens business operations

ALICE™ makes elevated skills in artificial intelligence and data science accessible to the assurance community. She can seamlessly access historical data, scalable infrastructure to analyse such data and then applying intelligence to such data in the form of predictive modelling and/or machine learning. It is not like how people are doing same set of things with different tools – you have the combination of everything

ALICE™ is intuitive

Through its prebuilt control procedures, ALICE™ has the power to act intuitively. She integrates disparate and multiple sources of data from a wide variety of business disciplines into a cohesive and intelligent lens through which various stakeholders can have more clarity and visibility of their business functions.

How ALICE™ built oversight on the journal culture across a diverse set of companies with diverse journal processes

Problem

The organisation faced limited visibility to journal entry culture and processing behaviors across businesses. There were high volume of non-routine journal entries and resource constraints allowed audit oversight to only journal entries of material value. Another challenge was limited scope to flag indicators of management fraud.

Solution

ALICE™ solved this problem by providing real-time and continuous monitoring of all journal entries, and flagged abnormal entries for further investigation (monitoring journals indicative of fraud). She did so by curating data sets created from ledger and company-wide systems. Human insights, industry standards and company policy were used to create a contextualized risk matrix.

Outcome

ALICE™ provided Continuous monitoring of the journals. The Journal entry testing function was transformed into management fraud monitoring control. Real-time and continuous monitoring was performed with ‘abnormal’ entries flagged for further investigation. Reporting was done using executive dashboards and insights.

Capabilities of ALICE™ for Payroll Liquidity Modelling

Problem

A large logistics company faced challenges in analyzing large volumes of payroll data within short timeframe. Various methods were used to apply prescribed tracking metrics. Each sub organization applied it differently and changed the process frequently. Also, disparate data sources were used with no common data standards or schemas. The primary client need was to look for liquidity modelling of cash flow to manage impact of Covid-19 related payments. Large number of data sets were needed to be ingested on a monthly basis (300+).

Solution

ALICE™ Curated data sets to ingest disparate and siloed data sources such as HR data, ESS audit logs, general ledger and company policy by using ALICE connector which standardized data from sharepoint. ALICE™ also took into account various factors that were applied in relation to COVID-19 dispensations and allowances. ALICE used Human intelligence and translated into reusable algorithms for specific objectives.

Outcome

ALICE™ helped in building continuous insights to monitor and manage workforce. This helped in Real-time flagging of potential non-compliances of company through executive dashboards on payroll trends . The overall ALICE™ project was completed in under 3 weeks for the first results. The reporting was done using MS Power BI dashboards and visualised output was curated in less than 4 days.

Request for proposal

Submit a request for a proposal to explore how our services can help you and your company.

Copyright © 2021 Bidvest Advisory Services (Pty) Ltd. ‘ALICE’ and ‘ALICE ROBOT DEVICE’ are trademarks of Bidvest Advisory Services (Pty) Ltd (and the company’s products and services are covered by patents in various countries).