Cédric MARNAS

Since March of 2007, an Internal Control System platform has been created, ensuring the coordination/management of the ICS project in the three Legal Entities forming part of the Social and Economic Unity of Bayer CropScience based in Lyon, France (Bayer CropScience France SAS, Bayer CropScience SA and Bayer CropScience Holding SA).

I am currently working as an ICS Support for the three companies.

I started working for Bayer CropScience France SAS as a trainee so as to validate my business school diploma. After the training session, I was hired as an Internal Control System Manager Junior so as to manage the implementation of the internal control over financial reporting (ICOFR) - due to SOX and the financial security law implementation - by supporting the ICS Manager Senior.

My experience acquired during my training session at Imaje SA allowed me to take more responsibilities and to participate actively in the identification and the analysis of the potential financial risks for each business process and IT process identified as risky by the group and the internal auditors.
The procedure consisted in organizing meetings with the process owners and the operational people involved and to describe the process on a flowchart, step by step. The second part was to identify all potential risks of fraud referring to these activities described and to cover them by implementing a new control or materializing an existing one.
The third part consisted in creating a risk matrix with the referring activities and controls, the testing procedure and the responsible (of the control, of the testing, of the sub-process and the process in respect with the four-eyes-principle or the segregation of duties), to be in line with the COSO requirements. All the documentation is in English (official company language) and is now followed-up during monthly steering committees’ meetings so as to make the internal control management more and more efficient (e.g. reducing the number of key controls, involving people so as the reduce the number of controls per person, etc.).

I am also responsible of the follow-up of the management testing, by organizing SOX sensitizing meetings, internal control tools’ training meetings (like the Risk Navigator in which the testing results are entered), so as to respect all the Bayer group requirements in terms of design of the tests.

I ensure the link between operational people involved and the auditors before or during their intervention (there are two audit teams in the same time, one constituted of internal auditors coming from the head officer in Germany to ensure the management testing is properly done, another constituted of local audit team in charge of the local compliance confirmation).
This role allows me to be also one of the links between the local management and the German Head Office and the accounting platform created in Spain (service provider).

The main difficulty of this mission was to implement a huge project while a social plan was effective. It resulted in increasing the workload (materialization of the controls, testing and audit periods, etc.) and reducing the staff in the same time (more work for less people). The second difficulty was the delay in implementing the project. It was normally planned for 2004, the same year as the SAP R/3 implementation but operational people could not be available for the both projects in the same time.
Therefore the ICS one was locally scheduled for 2005, whereas all the Group companies remained the implementation schedule for 2004, to be ready for 2006.

In order to pay my studies, I entered Pizza Hut (Yum! Group) as a cooker from November 2004 to June 2006.

As a company of the Dover Group – American group quoted at the NYSE – Imaje SA had to implement the Sarbanes Oxley Act’s requirement concerning the internal control over financial reporting. As a trainee, I supported the person in charge for the internal control within the Supply Chain department. Since it was the beginning of the SOX implementation in this French company, we had to identify the processes with potential financial risks or fraud risks and we had to find controls able to cover those risks.
I was responsible of the design of guidelines for operational people so as to generate all the proves of the controls.
I was also responsible of the creation and design of procedures for the process owners to help them how to proceed the management testing.
I participated to the creation and the design of the Risk matrixes with the help of the process owners and my hierarchical responsible.

As a parallel mission, my responsible - who was also the Head of Controlling for the Sales and Distribution Department - asked me to design a matrix of estimated budget for the creation of a platform in Asia.

Responsible for customers located in Drôme and Ardèche countries - France

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