Auditrice Interne chez Lafarge

Internal Auditor at Lafarge

Main tasks of an Internal Auditor at Lafarge

My name is Anne, I’m working for Lafarge as an Internal Auditor.

As an auditor our main mission, or I’ll say our main objective is to, when we visit an entity or review a process, is to look at how the process is currently performed, what are the controls in place, what are the risks, how they are covered. Our role at the end of that is to make sure, that we share with them a recommendation on how they can cover the risk in a better way and in some cases, if we see a good practice, try to pick out that good practice and have it shared with other entities and order function. We don’t have any speciality in the type of process or in a region, we cover all the processes and all the regions. For example, my last assignment was in Canada and before that, I was in Poland. And in both missions, I worked on completely different processes. So, there are no specialisations in any case.

The last mission I had was in Canada. I was in charge of Health and Safety and I also looked at logistics. I had discussions with the people responsible in that entity of the health and safety processes and also people in charge of logistics. I also discuss within Lafarge corporate of people in charge of logistics and also internal controllers, health and safety. I went to various, various sources of documents that we have or sites, internal intranets that we have, to know where the BU was in terms of logistics and health and safety, that enabled me to prepare my work programmes because I had to. Then I went on the field and since I was looking at the concrete business, we would go on plants, really big plants, and cover those, do interviews, testing on each individual site. In terms of testing, we have two types of testing: we can test by asking questions and after asking those questions, we ask them to share documents they have with us. Or we can cover a period of transaction, pick a sample and test in the sense that, make sure that the sample we selected is really, really exactly what it’s supposed to be, in terms of controls, reviews, supporting documentation, that’s what the testing we do. During the preparation phase, what we have to do at the end of the interviews, to try to define what are the risks specific to the B. And on the field, we’ll focus on those specific risks because for process we can have 100 risks, but for a specific entity you might end up having only 20 you need to cover. Between those 20, five are specific and 15 are more general.

Advantages of being an Internal Auditor at Lafarge

What I like about my job... I would say the first thing is the team. We work for around a period of six weeks, split and you have another team starting all over again. So this is very, very interesting in terms of how to blend into a team, how to adapt to different cultures, to different ways of perceiving things is something I really like. Another thing I really like is that we travel a lot so, looking at the same process in four, five, six different entities will be completely different. You won’t have the same perception, the same way of doing things. This is something very, very interesting. It’s more like it looks like a project, each time is a new project we’re working on. And the last thing I appreciate is that we cover different types of market. We have what we call mature markets, which would be North America and Western Europe, and we have what you call emerging markets: we have Brazil, Russia, China, India and all those other countries, that’s very interesting.

Something I don’t like as an Internal Auditor… I won’t say something I don’t like, I’ll say something you have to be aware of, it’s part of the package, it’s part of the deal: you are gone half of the year. And when you are gone half of the year, you have to find the right balance between your personal life and your professional life.

I had a feeling ‘I want to learn a lot’. I was looking for something challenging. And when I say something challenging, something that’ll push me out of my comfort zone and I can tell you I am pushed sometimes a lot out of my comfort zone. And another thing is that it’s in the industry, I like working in industry. The third point is that you have a big portion of activity happening in emerging markets. You can go in the Middle East for example, in Dubai you feel things changing, you have the feeling that things are changing quite fast.

Career prospects for an Internal Auditor at Lafarge

You can do pretty much everything. We have people who now work in logistics, people working in finance, people working in purchasing…You name it… The possibilities I would say are quite big, there are no limits. It depends of course on the timing. Before working for Lafarge I used to work in finance, I’m more finance-oriented, maybe I’d like to shift to operations. I’ll think about it when the time will come.