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Forward Deployed Engineering
Forward Deployed Engineers for Internal Audit, Risk, and Finance
We embed senior engineers and practitioners inside your function to build the automation, not just recommend it. Process restructuring, control automation, and agent deployment inside your environment.
The Gap
Assessment Tells You What Is Broken. It Does Not Fix It.
Internal audit, risk, and finance functions are all carrying more scope against flat headcount. The assessment lands, the roadmap gets approved, and then nothing moves, because nobody on the team has the engineering capacity to build what the report asked for. The finding and the fix require different skills, and most organizations only buy the first one.
Most advisory firms stop at the recommendation. We build it.
What happens without build capacity
Capabilities
What We Build
Four capabilities. They apply the same way across audit, risk, and finance. Most engagements combine two or three.
Process Restructuring and Optimization
Map the current state, quantify the handoffs and rework, redesign the flow, then implement it. Value stream mapping, process flowcharts, and automation discovery run through Keystone, our internal controls program builder.
Control Automation
Convert manual detective controls into automated preventive and detective controls. Fewer key controls, smaller testing populations, and lower annual hours without reducing coverage. Applies equally to SOX controls and to close controls.
Workflow and Reporting Automation
Build the recurring work out of the calendar. Evidence collection, sampling, reconciliation, status reporting, and issue tracking, wired into the systems your team already uses.
Agent Deployment
Deploy and configure AI agents inside your environment with the governance, logging, and human review gates that make the output defensible to an external auditor.
Application
Where We Apply It
The capability is horizontal. The processes are not. These are the workflows we are most often asked to rebuild.
Internal Audit
Risk and Compliance
Finance
Delivery Model
Forward Deployed, Not Handed Off.
A forward deployed engineer sits inside your function for the duration of the build. Not a discovery phase, a deck, and a departure. The engineer who scopes the work writes the code, and a senior practitioner sits alongside to keep the build inside professional standards.
Embedded
The engineer works in your environment, on your systems, in your cadence. Not offshore, not a ticket queue.
Paired with a Practitioner
A former CAE or controller reviews every build for control implications, auditability, and standards alignment.
Transferred
Your team owns and operates what we build. Documentation, runbooks, and handover are in scope, not a change order.
Independence
Where We Build, We Do Not Assure.
If Cherry Hill Advisory builds automation over a control, Cherry Hill Advisory does not provide independent assurance over that same control. The separation is defined in writing at engagement start and documented in the scope of work.
Three reasons this is stated up front rather than handled quietly in scoping:
Where an engagement touches both sides, we staff separate teams with separate reporting lines, or we decline the assurance side.
How to Start
Engagement Shapes
Common Questions
Questions We Get
An engineer who works inside your organization rather than from a vendor's office. They sit in your environment, use your systems, attend your stand-ups, and build against your actual constraints instead of a specification written six weeks earlier. The model comes out of the AI labs. We pair it with audit and finance practitioners so the build holds up under review.
A platform gives you capability and leaves configuration to you. RPA automates the click path of a process without questioning whether the process should exist. We redesign the process first, then build only what survives that step, using whatever combination of tooling, scripting, and agents fits your stack. You are buying an outcome inside your environment, not a license.
Yours, in almost every case. Automation that lives in a vendor environment creates a dependency and a third-party risk finding. We build inside your tenancy, under your access controls, and hand over the source and the runbooks at close.
Yes, with the boundary defined in writing at engagement start. We do not provide independent assurance over controls we built. Where both are needed we staff separate teams with separate reporting lines, or we take one side and not the other.
A Discovery Sprint is fixed fee and sized to the process count. Build engagements are scoped from the sprint output, priced against the automation candidates you choose to fund. We do not quote a build before the process is mapped, because the estimate would be fiction.
Yes, if the driver is control, compliance, or audit exposure. SOX evidence, close controls, reconciliation integrity, and segregation of duties all run through this practice.
You do. Source code, documentation, configuration, and runbooks transfer at close. There is no licensing tail and no requirement to retain us to keep it running.
Start With the Process, Not the Tool.
A two week Discovery Sprint tells you which parts of your audit, control, or close process are worth automating and what each one is worth. Everything after that is a funding decision.
Schedule a Scoping Call