Business Continuity Management: Recovery to Resilience
COVID-19 Coma Crises and Chaos
The COVID-19 outbreak was first and foremost a human tragedy, affecting hundreds of thousands of people. The global economy was induced into a temporary coma as governments and healthcare systems responded with rigorous, at-scale physical-distancing measures to drive a significant reduction in the number of new cases.
Business leaders, although not fully prepared for such a large-scale pandemic, initiated crises management program by asking managers to ensure disrupted processes could be recovered and critical IT systems were available to support “work from home” so businesses could continue essential operations such as customer service, supply chain management and financial processing.
IT Managers were under pressure to enable new capabilities to suddenly support an entirely remote workforce, which required effective access controls and assurance over ERP systems that enable significant business processes.
For many organizations, the path to recovery remains chaotic as traditional metrics and assumptions have been rendered irrelevant. Business and IT managers often have different priorities and time objectives, making coordinated recovery ineffective, if not impossible.
Continue with Clarity Collaboration and Confidence
Organizations must adapt essential new capabilities to recover and continue forward towards resilience, which requires a structured response to Covid-19 crisis, including the following management actions:
• Reclaim clarity by communicating key performance and risk metrics for the “new normal.”
• Regain productivity with workforce collaboration as well as secure connections and communication with customers, suppliers, partners and other third parties.
• Rebuild confidence by maintaining effective business process controls and critical IT systems.
SafePaaS provides a structured framework to assist business continuity now, build resilience for what’s next, and help reform your future for what comes beyond the pandemic. You can gain immediate access to easy-to-use apps, content and best practices to support all phases of Business Continuity Management (BCM) life cycle which will help you assess risks, manage remote work collaboration, detect process bottlenecks and monitor operations enabled by ERP systems.
Organizations that adopt a structured framework to execute resilient strategies, operate fluidly and adapt quickly to threats and disruptions can continue on their strategic path, beat competitors to market, launch new products and services with calculated efficiencies, and avoid major issues that affect operations, reputation and the bottom line.
Risk Assessment
Assess impact of workforce constraints and shortages on services and customers to the impact on working capital of supply-chain disruption. Identify risk tolerance level to fluctuations in dynamic consumer demand. Discover risk to critical business systems such as emerging cyber threats and access policy violations due to elevated privileges to enable remote access to business-critical data. SafePaaS Risk Library provides a unified platform to upgrade your ERM framework to assess emerging risks and monitor Key Risk Indicators (KRI’s) to reduce frequency and severity of loss events. Risk dashboards with drill down capabilities enable you to perform root-cause analysis in real-time resulting in better decisions based on context and perspective to data from multiple sources. Support for multiple risk methodologies such as COSO, ISO 31000, CoBit, ITL etc. Configurable risk rating algorithm and assessment workflows to rate risk over time using variable weighting measures, location, business process, etc.
Remote Workforce Management
Effective remote workforce requires the alignment and optimization of key processes, policies, and communications. Employees need secure access to their authorized job functions in ERP systems to perform their daily work as they navigate the new challenges of working from home. SafePaaS iAccess Identity Governance keeps employees securely connected to business-critical ERP systems and their work groups to maintain productive daily work schedule, as they juggle personal commitments.
Management can “lead from a distance” and ensure employees are productive by monitoring activities performed in business systems on a daily basis against the key performance indicators (KPI’s) established in SafePaaS activity monitors. Access controls prevent Segregation of Duties violations as new workers are on-boarded as business tap into a contingent or alternative workforce.
Process Workflow Optimization
Whether your processes are partially automated or digitally advanced, the distributed remote workforce, and strained technology resources, requires workflow optimization to collaborate with business partners, streamline supply chain and effectively manage customer relationships.
You can deploy SafePaaS process management workflows to enable self-service capabilities in key business functions – accounts payable, procurement, accounts receivable, expenses, assets, and general ledger – giving management unprecedented visibility, agility and control over the entire operations.
SafePaaS Financial Close Manager can streamline period-end close process by replacing spreadsheets, three-ring binders and emails, that are overwhelming and easily overlooked, with tasks that can be tied to preparers and reviewers, creating a central audit trail of exceptions for financial reporting and certification. Finance Managers can remotely monitor the close process and comment on the preliminary trial balance reviews, so disclosure risks are mitigated.
Continuous Controls Monitoring
Audit and Risk managers have both an obligation and an opportunity to help their companies manage the most critical risks COVID-19 has either created or magnified. Now more than ever, organizations need to transform internal controls testing process from manual collection of evidence to fine-grained monitoring controls that track user access to sensitive functions / data, system configurations, master data and transactions in business-critical systems.
With SafePaaS, you can continuously monitor business activities within your enterprise applications. You get instant access to the SafePaaS catalog of automated application monitors covering key controls for significant processes such as Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Hire-to-Retire, Design-to-Ship, and Financial Record-to-Report.