Heico Companies is a family-owned diversified manufacturer headquartered in downtown Chicago, with about 9,000 employees and more than 70 operating companies spread across five continents. Ed Levy, Head of Internal Audit, explains how moving off a homegrown solution and onto Diligent freed his team from manual, duplicated work and introduced accelerated audit cycles.
Customer at a glance
- Industry: Manufacturing
- Location: Chicago, IL, USA
- Job title: Head of internal audit
- Diligent solution: Diligent Audit
Key takeaways
- Faster audit close: What was once a best-case Friday finish is now a Thursday close with no open items. Levy estimates the improvement has reduced audit cycles by approximately 25%.
- Less manual rework: Observations used to be typed into work papers, testing templates, audit reports and the management action plan tracker separately, at least four times over. With Diligent, an observation written once flows automatically into the audit report and the management action plan.
- No more manual chasing: The system now emails management action plan owners automatically when items come due, so auditors no longer have to track deadlines and chase people for evidence.
- Centralized testing at scale: Heico piloted disbursement testing across its 48 operating companies. Instead of pulling a file and testing at every single business unit, the team now tests centrally once or twice a year with a larger sample and gets the same coverage.
- Room to grow with AI: Ed and his team are exploring ACL AI Studio for new use cases, including validating vendor due diligence by matching call records against changes in vendor master files.
"By partnering with Diligent, we've been able to modernize the internal audit function. We talked about centralized testing for years, and now, with Diligent, we're doing it."
Ed Levy, Head of Internal Audit, Heico Companies
How Diligent helped
Before Diligent, Heico's internal audit team ran on a homegrown solution. It got the job done, but every change meant re-entering the same information in multiple places manually.
- Challenge: Manual, duplicated data entry across work papers, reports and action plan trackers
- Solutions: Diligent Internal Audit Management, ACL Analytics and ACL AI Studio meaning observations flow automatically into audit reports and management action plans, plus automated owner reminders
- Outcome: Audits close around 25% faster, with disbursement testing now centralized and simplified across 48 operating companies.
"Prior to Diligent, best case, there would be no open items by Friday. Now it's not unheard of that we're closing audits on Thursday with no open items."
Ed Levy, Head of Internal Audit, Heico Companies
See what's possible for your organization
If manual data entry and disconnected systems are slowing down your audit function, Diligent Audit solutions including Internal Audit Management, Audit AI and ACL AI Studio can help your team centralize testing and close audits faster, the way Heico Companies did.
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