Last month I had the pleasure of presenting at the SAP Inside Track in Toronto. A well-attended event that drew nearly 200 partners and customers my session on enterprise risk management drew a much focused crowd. “How do we plan for things we don’t know?” “How do we consider managing our processes given constant business changes?” These are compelling questions which have faced organization processes and supply chains with increasing impact over the past five years. Automotive companies had to figure out how to resource black pearl paint when the Japanese Tsunami hit. Disney left Bangladesh as a contract manufacturing base after a devastating building collapse and failure on the part of the government to see key safety issues transparently before disaster struck. Companies are giving more attention to SWIFT account financial audits to make sure global payments are using proper account numbers to avoid error and reduce fraud. These and other factors add up to a growing attention and acknowledgement at the corporate board room and practitioner level that enterprise risk management (ERM) is a necessary business process in its own right.
My presentation on SlideShare is attached. In the SAP landscape, the key five elements to any ERM program are:
- The SAP Business Suite or Line of Business Applications
- SAP Risk Management
- SAP Access Controls
- SAP Process Controls
- NetWeaver Audit Management
My overview article on Tech Target will be available shortly here.