First case usage of ARM for an offshore wind farm
The Triton Knoll wind farm project is an important future source of home-grown renewable energy in the UK. Now in the construction phase with the installation of the onshore electrical system, the offshore array and infrastructure will be located 20 miles off the coast of Lincolnshire and 28 miles from the coast of north Norfolk. The joint project venture is majority owned by Innogy, with partners J-Power and Kansai Electric Power. Headquartered in Essen, Germany, innogy employs staff across the globe and is a subsidiary of RWE.
Streamline processes and reduce the administrative burden
Traditionally innogy relied on spreadsheets to develop risk registers, calculate quantitative risk assessments and manage its contingencies. However, the administrative burden was preventing Risk Managers from becoming more involved with decision making and managing contingency rather than managing a spreadsheet.
innogy wanted to streamline processes and methodologies, creating a central repository of information to allow a transfer of knowledge to all future wind farm projects. Following a rigorous due diligence and procurement process, Active Risk Manager (ARM) from Sword Active Risk was selected for its advanced functionality and flexibility.
Robert Jackson, Project Risk & Insurance Manager – Triton Knoll said; “We chose Active Risk Manager because it offered us the ability to focus on the specific areas of project risk management that we wanted to address whilst retaining the core principles of our risk management approach. It is an intuitive and easy to use tool that has reduced the administrative burden on the team. The benefits have been felt across the entire project and reflected in the employee feedback survey scores which have been overwhelmingly positive.”
Live data supporting risk management decisions across time zones
ARM Desktop, ARM Risk Express and ARM Risk Performance Manager (RPM) are used by all members of the project team which consists of 70 people. The team are dispersed across multiple sites within the UK and EU. ARM Risk Express allows the project team to update risks, exposures and actions in real-time whilst in situ, ensuring the rest of the team have access to the very latest live data from remote locations. The intuitive interface runs on any browser, allowing access from mobile devices, laptops or desktops.
Jackson commented; “We wanted a risk management solution that could benefit all members of the project team, providing them with the flexibility to work remotely at the project site. We are a truly global project with people based in multiple locations around the world, so being able to standardise processes across geographical boundaries is vital.”
ARM has delivered enterprise-grade functionality to the Triton Knoll project team allowing Risk Managers to update risks within a standardised and easily accessible environment whether this be the office, or at site using a mobile device, removing the need to manually record the data into a spreadsheet to enter at a later date. This not only saves time and reduces administration but ensures that the entire team has visibility of the latest live data.
Greater insight improving decision making and future learning
ARM is used across the project team to track the project contingency exposure. Information is held in a central repository rather than silos, providing better insight across the project. Increased clarity has improved contingency budget planning and decision making, delivering better business outcomes and greater engagement within the risk management process across the project
“The ability for project managers to note risks directly into ARM whilst offshore on vessels or on-site at a fabrication yard means that we can mitigate or capitalise on events as they occur allowing decisions to be made in real-time using live data,” explained Jackson.
Advanced reporting functionality
Triton Knoll has comprehensive risk identification processes to identify, consolidate, and prioritise the risks facing the project. A report is regularly produced highlighting to the board and shareholders the important risks with a quantitative assessment of the probability and impact of each risk.
Previously the report would be created manually and would be a time-intensive operation, today the report can be easily produced using ARM Risk Performance Manager (RPM) without the need for IT department resources. ARM RPM allows the team to produce customised reports for the board and investors in a variety of formats such as dashboards, charts and matrices to make the information easily digestible and relatable to the audience.
Retaining key risk principles whilst building knowledge
Accumulating a knowledge base within ARM has been invaluable in driving the monthly risk workshops where all participants contribute and benefit. The workshops are used to track mitigations and evaluate the performance of the mitigation action taken.
“By systematically monitoring risk we have gained valuable insight that provides stakeholders with a greater understanding of business operations, objectives and challenges. More importantly, the knowledge and detailed analysis feeds back into the risk management process allowing us to make improved business decisions.” commented Jackson.
Robert Jackson concluded; “We haven’t had to change our behaviors to fit with the solution, instead ARM has adapted itself to our risk culture whilst enhancing and shaping our existing risk management processes for the better. Through using ARM, we have enhanced our existing core principles and reduced our administrative burden. The benefits have been numerous and ARM has the potential to be the tool that we will use for all future Offshore Wind farm projects globally.”
About Sword GRC
Sword GRC provides an award-winning platform for Governance, Risk and Compliance, made up of best-of-breed solutions that address the requirements of all enterprise market sectors. With a long and distinguished heritage, Sword GRC brings together a suite of complementary products in the GRC space available either as a cloud solution or standalone on-premises installations.
With a strong focus on driving fast time to value, and harnessing the latest technologies, Sword GRC delivers a versatile range of solutions that support better business decisions through a single view of risk to support enterprise-wide risk-based compliance. The Sword GRC product set covers Risk, Audit, Compliance, Policy Management and Incident Management
Sword GRC has offices in the UK, USA, Malaysia and Australia, servicing customers worldwide directly and through a growing network of partners.
For more information please visit: www.sword-grc.com
