8 use cases for an efficient and effective risk management solution

Business risk is multi-dimensional, dynamic, and omnipresent, but you wouldn’t know it by the narrow capabilities of most risk management solutions. They tend to audit only for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance reporting and other regulations, or “sample” a subset of data for security violations. They’re also typically bolt-on solutions that deliver flat reports instead of real-time, intelligence-driven analysis.

Even when the rest of an enterprise has modernized with real-time, collaborative cloud applications, the security, risk and audit functions can remain isolated—using outdated technology that perpetuates audit misses, time lags in identifying and mitigating risks, and gaps in insights. Some companies may have deployed integrated risk management (IRM) solutions, which is step up from the legacy focus on compliance, but can be misleading. IRM solutions try to provide an integrated view of how well an organization manages risk, but they’re typically bolt-on solutions themselves, and thus not integrated with an organization’s most critical business applications. This gives a false sense of security and keeps risk standalone, preventing the adoption of a risk-intelligent culture.

Oracle Risk Management and Compliance is very different. Purpose-built as a native solution for Oracle Fusion Cloud applications, it comprehensively and continuously monitors and informs on risk activity for eight key use cases:

ERP Key Use Cases

1. Optimize security design to minimize separation of duties (SOD) risk
2. Automate SOD controls for compliance reporting
3. Digitize user access certification workflows
4. Automate monitoring of user security
5. Automate monitoring of changes to critical configurations
6. Automate monitoring of financial transactions
7. Digitize audit and SOX compliance workflows
8. Digitize risk (ERM) and continuity (BMC) workflows

You can read in-depth about each use case in our paper, “Automate ERP Cloud Security and Internal Controls.”  Let’s look at why these use cases are important to your business. 

Efficient and effective risk management

Oracle Risk Management lets organizations automate many routine, labor-intensive tasks that support assurance, compliance, security, and fraud prevention.  For example, it helps streamline SOX compliance by eliminating spreadsheet and email-based tasks, approve user access to sensitive data, identify duplicate invoices, among other capabilities.

Automation and digitization of security, risk and audit functions is integral for efficiency, but a game-changing risk management solution should also be effective at continually improving financial controls, stopping cash leaks, errors, and fraud, and reducing audit expenses.  This can only be achieved by using advanced technology like artificial intelligence (AI).  

The power of AI-driven monitoring and analysis

Oracle Risk Management brings AI-driven analysis and monitoring to security, risk, and audit. Benefits include:

• Built-in monitoring and analysis in critical ERP business processes:  Bolt-on risk management solutions require data to be extracted from an organization’s most critical application—its ERP—for security, risk, and audit analysis. This increases, not decreases, security vulnerabilities. These solutions can compromise data integrity and create lag-times in identifying potentially damaging situations. Data extractions are not only time-consuming, but reactive, providing an incomplete assessment of risk. Oracle’s approach is ground-breaking because it keeps risk management data and transactional ERP data in one place. As a result, you can use ongoing analysis to continuously improve risk posture and more confidently manage changes in markets, regulations, and workforce or business disruptions.  
• Continuous, real time monitoring: The volume of data that organizations must consume and analyze continues to grow at unprecedented rates. Advanced technology like AI is required for risk identification and mitigation; without the advantages of AI-driven continuous monitoring and analysis, security, risk and audit functions become over-extended. This increases the chance of mistakes, and makes it difficult to use the data to help drive risk-based actions or decisions. Periodic analysis covers only a sampling of finance transactions, so it can be easy to miss a simple mistake—or purposeful fraud—among the thousands upon thousands of transactions your company generates daily. And when an audit does uncover an issue, it could be long after the damage is done, making the problem more time-consuming and costly.  With Oracle Risk Management and Compliance, organizations can audit 100% of their ERP transactions and configurations, enforce SOD to prevent external audit failures, and prevent unauthorized access to critical ERP processes. And, business process owners can review a dashboard at any time to see real-time information about user activity, and get alerts about potential issues, such as frequent changes made to supplier bank accounts.  As a result, an organization’s approach to risk management becomes proactive—not reactive—helping to identify potential risks at points of origins for immediate awareness and coordinated response. 

Build resilience with a complete risk solution

Oracle Risk Management and Oracle Cloud ERP are part of an integrated platform of cloud applications. When used together, you’ll always have a standardized, right-sized risk management strategy so you can prevail over change with confidence—knowing that a business change or an unforeseen disruption like a pandemic will not compromise your security or the financial integrity of your company.  This turns risk management into an enabler of change, whether that’s growth through M&A, launching a new product, or reconfiguring your ERP to support subscription business models.

Read our starter kit to learn best practices and take the first steps.