Risk management professionals know Microsoft Excel well — it’s versatile and embedded in daily operations. That’s why @RISK, our advanced risk analysis software, integrates directly within Excel, giving decision-makers powerful risk analysis capabilities exactly where their data lives. @RISK is used by leading companies in pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and many other industries to help improve decision-making, control costs, comply with regulations, and much more.
However, what happens when you have multiple risk registers within a department, or across an organization? How can you keep track of all risk management activities – or even combine, consolidate, and compare them? That’s where Lumivero’s Predict! comes in. Working together, @RISK and Predict! make it possible to create seamless integration between your risk analysis activities and your enterprise-wide risk management efforts.
In a recent webinar, “Better Together: How to Manage Risk End-to-End with Predict! and @RISK”, Trevor Jay, Technical Sales Manager at Lumivero, and Will Van der Merwe, Account Manager at Lumivero, walked us through some of the powerful features these two programs can offer risk management professionals.
Continue reading for the main takeaways or watch the full webinar on-demand.
Quickly evaluate risks across departments or organizations
Predict!’s main benefit is that it enables unparalleled high-level visibility of risk across business units or entire organizations. Different reporting tools make it possible to “slice and dice” data from multiple risk registers to find relationships, threats, and opportunities that might be less obvious from analyzing individual spreadsheets.
This image below shows a sample risk profile comparing the potential costs across different projects.
It's also possible to create bow-tie reports that allow for visualization of how different business functions impact the risk across a project.
The interactive Bow-tie capability allows detailed analysis of the causes and consequences of a risk event and the effectiveness of controls.
This Predict! Risk Visualiser report shows how risks are linked to each other. This highlights a risk with multiple links, indicating it could be more important than its standalone assessment.
These powerful visualizations are just two of the tools available within Predict! – tools that connect disparate risk analyses for more cohesive risk management at an enterprise-wide level.
Improve the security and traceability of company-wide risk registers
Spreadsheets are versatile, but prone to error. These errors aren’t trivial: In 2012, according to Forbes Magazine, formula mistakes in a manually updated Excel spreadsheet played a role in the infamous “London Whale” incident, which ultimately cost JP Morgan Chase more than $6 billion.
It can be difficult to spot errors in spreadsheets because they don’t track changes automatically. With Predict!, you can import spreadsheets into a centralized database that offers more transparency into who’s using your data, the edits they’re making, and more. This is essential for audit trails as well as for keeping errors under control.
Proactive risk management and notifications
Trevor Jay noted that risk registers in Excel are “just sitting there” – that is, they’re a passive storage receptacle for data, and that’s all. With Predict!, risk managers can receive notifications about changes to risk registers and “nudges” that encourage risk owners to update their data or their models.
"If you have mitigation actions tied to a risk," Jay explains, "and someone changes the completion date, you can automatically notify the risk owner that the associated mitigation plan has been impacted." These types of updates are only possible in Excel via manual review and editing.
Predict! integrates seamlessly with enterprise reporting tools
Predict! can also be integrated with other enterprise systems – not just Excel and @RISK. Application programming interfaces (APIs) allow other software programs to connect with Predict! to bring insights from Predict! into company-wide dashboards.
Predict! also includes its own powerful visualization tools to help you quickly create visualizations to show stakeholders and executives insights from your risk analyses or to help illustrate risk management strategies.
Built for risk management at scale
Finally, while it’s possible to make spreadsheets available to multiple users, managing workflows on a spreadsheet-by-spreadsheet basis is more difficult – particularly when hundreds of employees are involved.
"Some of our customers manage thousands of users and tens of thousands of risk records," says Will Van der Merwe. "Predict! is built to scale with the needs of growing organizations."
By uploading multiple risk registers into a consolidated database designed for multi-user access, Predict! creates a centralized data depository where administrators have granular control over user access – no matter how many users your organization may have.
Get started with @RISK and Predict!
Combined with the analysis tools available in @RISK, Predict! elevates your company’s risk management capabilities. Find out how you can empower your organization with better end-to-end risk analysis and risk management solutions that also improve data integrity and audit visibility—request a demo of @RISK and Predict!