Approva Releases New BizRights Architecture and Insights Technology

VIENNA, Va. --(Business Wire)-- Aug. 16, 2004 -- BizRights Version 2.1 Provides Expanded Versatility and Insight into Compliance and Business Process Efficiency

Approva(R) Corporation, a leader in enterprise controls management software for business processes, today announced the release of BizRights(R) Version 2.1, the first release to use its new BizRights Platform architecture, and the BizRights Authorizations Insight. The Authorizations Insight is the first of several Insights that provide unprecedented visibility into end-to-end business processes.

"Energen continues to enhance visibility into its business processes with the BizRights platform," said Sage Wagner, SAP Security Administrator at Energen Corporation (NYSE:EGN), a diversified energy holding company based in Birmingham, Ala. "Integrating the software tool into our SAP systems maintains software compliance and business efficiency while fostering a collaboration between internal audit, business management and IT security managers. Energen is making the obligation of compliance into an opportunity for business improvement."

BizRights Version 2.1 integrates with a company's ERP system to provide complete and continuous visibility into a company's business and financial systems. BizRights Version 2.1 significantly extends Approva's core product, BizRights, in the areas of performance, information richness and preventive capabilities. The new BizRights architecture presents new versatility and expandability for businesses that require continuous visibility into their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts. The new product architecture consists of three independent layers:

-- BizRights Platform - The platform consists of several analysis and reporting engines that extract data from multiple SAP systems, correlate that data against a set of business rules and report on potential issues, including segregation-of-duties violations, access to sensitive data and suspicious transactions with potential for error or fraud. The BizRights Platform contains software that extracts, correlates, analyzes, reports and provides a workflow process with audit documentation across a variety of SAP business processes such as procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, financial close and payroll.

-- BizRights Adapters - These specialized extraction tools pull necessary data independently from the ERP system. The autonomy of the adapters prevents system performance issues. Additionally, the BizRights Adapters are SAP certified.

-- BizRights Insights - This comprehensive series of end-to-end business rules, content and reports provides BizRights' users with deep insight into compliance issues and business process inefficiencies. Approva's first Insight, the BizRights Authorization Insight, contains thousands of rules designed to help companies achieve Sarbanes-Oxley compliance; prevents potential controls violations from entering the production environment; and generates reports on critical information such as which users have access to key sensitive data and who has roles that result in segregation-of-duties violations.

The architecture of the new BizRights version has been significantly enhanced, adding a broad set of new capabilities. Key upgrades include:

-- Standalone "What-if" Functionality - This enables users to determine the impact of process changes before applying them to the SAP system.

-- Pre-Defined HR Business Content - BizRights builds on its rich library of pre-defined business content with a set of rules specific to SAP HR, starting with payroll. All rules include support for different versions of SAP.

-- Greater Violation Details - The option to drill deeply into violation details is now available in multiple query types. For instance, a request can identify which rule was violated and by whom.

-- Performance Improvements on Data Extractions - This functionality reduces the amount of time required to extract data from an SAP system.

-- Improved User Interface Performance - New tab-based interfaces enhance the navigation speed of the Web-based interface and overall user experience.

-- Business-Friendly content - BizRights translates SAP's complex language into plain English. This includes the translation of transaction codes, authorization objects and field values. The Web-based user interface allows ordinary business people to utilize the tool, without any expensive client software changes or custom applications to learn.

-- Integrated Workflow Capability - BizRights allows users to pre-test changes, as well as route, approve and execute change requests. All changes and change requests are reported and documented for auditing purposes.

-- Expansion Capability and Flexibility - The new architecture allows future Insights to be created to monitor and improve business processes, without having to install an entirely new software architecture. Each package of rules, content, analysis techniques and reports comprise a unique BizRights Insight, which can be delivered independently, depending on customer needs and requirements.

"The new BizRights architecture, the Authorizations Insight and the improved functionality of BizRights 2.1 demonstrates Approva's continued dedication to providing its customers with total visibility into business processes in a user-friendly way," said Prashanth (PV) Boccasam, Approva's CEO and founder. "Future Insights from Approva will continue our practice of consistently providing our customers with the superior technology they need to achieve compliance and boost business efficiency."

About Approva Corporation

Approva Corporation is a leader in enterprise controls management software for ERP business processes. Continuous monitoring has become increasingly critical as companies consolidate their ERP instances, upgrade to new versions and roll out ERP to more users. Complying with government regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, amplifies the need for companies to increase the frequency, accuracy and depth of their audit process. In contrast to existing snapshot-in-time tools or manual solutions, Approva BizRights(R) product suite is an integrated monitoring business application that is continuous, business-friendly and proactive. Its business user-oriented solutions help financial executives, business managers, application security and auditors continuously identify, document, test, remediate and monitor business controls. The end results are greater visibility into business risk, improved compliance and increased efficiency. For more information visit us at www.approva.net.

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