Enterprise Risk and Compliance cockpit image generated by AI

Leading risk and compliance in any organization can sometimes feel like flying a fighter jet straight into a storm with no way of avoiding it. And your mission is to ensure that the plane goes through it without damages and continues its course smoothly.

Daunting, right? But there are upsides: 1. You are not alone since the entire organization – including Senior Management, is onboard, and 2. Contrarily to early wooden planes, yours can benefit from instant data available at your fingertips. Preventing you from finding out that one tank is burst and fuel leaking – slowly but surely – only once the gauge turns to critical red…

What makes a good cockpit?

When looking at how engineers design plane cockpits, they consider multiple dimensions of course, but with one output in mind: it needs to deliver the right information, at the right time, in the simplest possible way – while enabling immediate action under stressful conditions.

How does that compare to SAP Risk and Assurance Management might you say? Well, let’s continue this analogy!

Situational awareness

The pilot – here the 2nd line of defense composed of Risk Managers, Compliance Officers, Cybersecurity leads, etc., must understand everything happening around them (compliance coverage, control gaps, cyber threats) instantly.

SAP Risk and Assurance Management helps achieves this by combining data from various systems to show a unified and coherent view of compliance status. Regardless of the compliance initiative: financial governance, IT Security, tax checks, etc.

Controls Overview dashboard app with view of various key metrics of controls

Information prioritization

At Mach 3, information overload leads to paralysis or worse even, mistakes. The same applies to an organization.

SAP Fiori apps in SAP Risk and Assurance Management have been specifically designed to display only critical data with easy to grasp symbology (icons, colours) to make it obvious what needs to be done.

Manage Risks app

Head-Up Display

Granted not many Compliance Officers have 3D helmet systems in their office to visualise their compliance progress – but that would be pretty cool, key data is directly in the line of sight with advanced reporting. No need to look at the ground – or Excel sheet – to know at what altitude you are.

Internal control, compliance and risk management information rendered in SAP Analytics Cloud

Hands-On Throttle-And-Stick

Maybe not as critical in an office than in a plane, but still, the office version of the stick controller is the… mighty computer mouse!

Less clicking, more doing. Critical details are available directly on the line records in the dedicated apps. This reduces the need to search for information so enables users to act rapidly and decisively.

My Controls app

High level of automation

A digital co-pilot, this is precisely what this is. Alleviating the workload so that Compliance and Risk specialists – but also Senior Management when using this information, can turn their attention to tactics and decision-making. As a result, the system must behave autonomously and manage non-critical tasks itself. These can include categorizing and closing false alerts so that users can spend effort on resolving real issues requiring attention and expertise.

Predicted Conclusions for Issue Management and Remediation

Integration of all systems

To achieve the automation mentioned in the previous paragraph, there is one prerequisite: everything must work as one system, not separate components. Only then can true automation take place. Navigation, communication, and sensors must be fully integrated so that there is no need to manually reconcile different sources.

Simplified diagram of integration points in SAP Risk and Assurance Management

Clear and immediate alert

As for a pilot, business process owners must react rapidly to threats and danger. Increasing risk level of course but also control deficiency fit well in this category. Early warnings with real time notification categorized by severity provide them with timely information to address the underlying issues. Alerts in the tool of course, but also sent to the beloved email inboxes.

Email notification with direct link to the record

Rapid drill-down capability

Should an alert be raised because a control has failed, it is critical to seamlessly transition from awareness to action. Users must be able to quickly navigate from an overview to the underlying details of the inconsistency and initiate the appropriate remediation steps without delay. This ability to navigate efficiently from insights to action ensures that risks are addressed promptly, and compliance is maintained in a continuous and controlled manner.

Direct access to the live source system data for root cause resolution

Reliability and redundancy

For external stakeholders, process checks performed in SAP Risk and Assurance Management might not be perceived as critical. But when they realize that these control checks relate to compliance, then the perception shifts. This information must remain available for auditors and regulators, but also for Senior Management to support their decision making and provide traceability in case of investigation. Here, backups and fail-safe help prevent failures.

In this area, “SAP cloud solutions provide contractually agreed-upon service-level agreements (SLAs) for resilience and recovery. Customers can enhance these baselines SLAs by selecting premium options appropriate to their business requirements and threat models, including high availability and disaster recovery deployment options” (Securing SAP Cloud Environments)

SAP Trust Center landing page

SAP Risk and Assurance Management enables organizations to continuously oversee risks, detect process deficiencies and compliance issues instantly, and act where it matters most.

As for cockpits in fighter jets, in both cases success depends on integrating critical information into a clear, real-time, and actionable control centre.

What about you, how does your organization design its compliance cockpit? I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments on this blog.

And if you are interested in learning more about SAP solutions for Governance, Risk, and Compliance, feel free to fill-in the demo request form!