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 Common Business Questions & Benefits

Please find some common questions that we are asked below. They cover a wide range of disciplines and requirements, but are relevant in every industry.

1. Can ARM help me achieve CMMI level 5?

Absolutely, ARM can and does help projects, divisions and companies step through the different levels of CMMI. This includes level 5, where risks and opportunities need to be managed. ARM has the flexability and configurability to grow with your process, or indeed lead your process.

2. We have a problem with being able to allocate resources appropriately to deal with the top risks within our portfolio of programs, can ARM help us do this?

Yes, ARM has a unique capability in being able to roll up risks from across multiple programs, projects, or business divisions. This allows you to see a cross portfolio view of key risks and their impact to your business or project success so that you can then apply the right resources to maximize return on investment on your risk mitigation.

3. My CFO wants to see a future year risk exposure and the associated planned cost of mitigation and the resultant risk exposure, currently this is taking a lot of manual calculations and is very inefficient. Can ARM help us make this process more efficient and deliver the outputs we need to make informed and considered decisions?

The feedback from our clients is that one of the unique values they get from ARM is being able to produce charts that the board and the executive team can make decisions on. These include multi period (year) risk exposure forecasts with associated spend and net risk exposure positions. This allows the CFO to decide when and to whom capital allocation should be given.

4. Our company has multiple sites and locations, we need a system that can be physically located in our IT environment, but is accessible by our geographically distributed workforce. Can ARM support this, or does it need to be loaded on each desktop?

ARM is a web based application; designed and developed from the ground up with web-based architecture. It is also tested to a level of over 10,000 unique users with concurrency ratio's for different types of activities, eg. Reporting, entering a risk and so on. ARM only needs to located in once place. All users can access ARM through their browser, irrespective of location. Furthermore, the security model ensures that only registered users can get into the application, and then once in, their security profile will determine what they can see and do.

5. I have heard ARM is the standard risk system in certain industries - is this true?

Whilst we do not like to gloat, we have heard the same thing. In the Defence/Aero industry, ARM is the de facto standard. Many of our clients have standardized across their divisions, large programs, and in deed company wide. This also includes US and UK government agencies, where RFP's to Prime Contractors actually specify Active Risk Manager in support of a standardized and rigorous risk management process.

6. We have a risk management process and use Excel to support this process and capture the data. We have recently run into issues around corruption of our standard process, because one division adds new fields or columns. It has now turned into a end of month formatting process rather than a risk management decision making process. Can ARM help alleviate this?

Yes. This is a common situation. One of the key value statements we see from our clients and partners, is that ARM allows for a standard risk process to be documented and put into a workflow to ensure that all areas of the business are following a consistent and rigorous risk management process. We also recognize that what you do for risk today is not what you will require for risk tomorrow. In support of this philosophy and your investment in ARM, we make all capability configurable, including the ability to turn it on or off. This means that ARM can adapt to your process as you step through maturity models.

7. We heard ARM is a great enterprise system, but we are concerned that it may be too much for our current needs, is this true?

ARM is a great system! There may well be more capability in the system today than what your current maturity requires. The great thing is that this level of comprehensiveness can be scaled back through configuration. Meaning that you can set ARM up to be as simple as you like, knowing with satisfaction that you can turn on additional capability incrementally to support your risk maturation growth. What a great investment in today's needs and yet supporting the future.

8. Can ARM help us reduce our insurance premiums?

Definitely, and on a number of levels. We have had customers who through demonstrable use of a rigorous and standard enterprise risk management have been able to seek a reduction in their insurance. Other companies, once putting all their risks into ARM, have realized that they are paying multiple times for the same risk! And finally, through a proper assessment of risks and their likelihood and level of impact, are able to decide which risks they really should be insuring against and those that they should self-insure. We had one client who reduced their annual insurance premiums by 10% while the industry average was going up by 10%! A net 20% reduction on their annual insurance bill.

9. S&P requirements have recently included a pillar on ERM. Will your software help us support this?

Yes. ARM is the leading product for introducing a standard and rigorous risk management process that will ensure the right information is available to the right people at the right time so that the right decisions can be made.