Crane Credit Union is a $1 billion credit union based in Indiana. Crane was experiencing consistent growth over time, but their audit team had remained the same size.

The impact that sustained growth with limited audit resources was easy to quantify. Crane had more than 70 open and unresolved findings. Some of those findings were overdue by 1 or even 2 years.

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In Need of a Better Way

Tom Cosby, Internal Auditor at Crane, had been managing audits and tracking findings using an Excel spreadsheet. It was “very cumbersome,” he said. “It was very inefficient and very time-consuming… the way we did audits was very slow.”

Crane’s limited audit bandwidth also had real impacts on the future. In addition to the risk of large numbers of unresolved findings, they couldn’t expand their audit plan to keep pace with the needs of their growing credit union. Cosby wanted to add more audits to the audit plan, but there was simply no available time.

Cosby had looked for audit software to help automate the process, but the solutions on the market were very cumbersome with a large learning curve. Additionally, the solutions were always way too expensive for the Supervisory Committee and the executive team to support. They just weren’t a fit for Crane.

Cosby discovered Redboard and began working with the audit management platform to centralize documents, simplify management, and automate reminders and communication.

A Dramatic Improvement in Efficiency and Timely Remediation

In a little over 6 months, Cosby had remediated all of Crane’s open and unresolved findings. Furthermore, Cosby noted, “I have been very fortunate in that I have not had one that has gone over a remediation date since we've been using Redboard, where before I had numerous ones that went over their date.”

Following up with people to address findings used to take a considerable amount of time, but Cosby estimates that he’s since “reduced that time by 50% of what it used to be.” Instead of sending manual reminders, Cosby now spends more time on audit activities and less time on tedious administrative tasks. Overall, he says Crane is seeing time savings of around 25% per audit. This time savings, combined with more efficient tracking of findings, has allowed him to add more audits to the audit plan—a feat that wouldn’t have been possible before.

Cosby isn’t the only person at Crane who appreciates the new automation and structure in their audits.

“Every business unit that has utilized Redboard for uploading audit requests or putting in the documentation for remediation has had nothing but great things to say about it,” Cosby said. “They say it is so user-friendly.”

Simplicity and user-friendliness were key considerations for Crane—Cosby had spoken about audit software with auditors at other credit unions, and most of them were looking for something less complicated. Redboard fits the bill exactly. Cosby said, “If I were out there looking for an audit software, I would highly recommend Redboard.”

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