Published on July 29, 2022
Tata companies have been using Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) to identify risks, mitigate them, and to achieve business objectives. However, Tata companies are at different levels of maturity in the way they access and mitigate risks. On one end of the spectrum there are companies that have carefully crafted out their ERM process and their ERM efforts are integrated with strategy, operations, finance, technology and data security, and are constantly looking at ways to benchmark its existing processes with the global best. At the other end, there could be companies which still have room to drive a culture of ERM. Sensing this need for several years, TBExG has documented 16 best practices available in the group (available on the EDGE portal), facilitated 4 one-to-one best practice sharing sessions and associated implementation in recipient companies, conducted 9 webinars and 2 Deep Dive Collaborative Benchmarking Reports on the subject.
In view of the ever-increasing interest in the subject and multiple requests from companies to understand ERM practices in other Tata companies, TBExG, kickstarted a Tata Group ERM Forum. This forum endeavours to bring senior ERM professionals from Tata companies on a common platform to discuss and share latest trends in risk management.
The inaugural session of this forum on July 19, 2022, witnessed active participation of over 70 ERM practitioners from over 40 Tata companies. The session started with a welcome address by Sanjeev Singh, Vice President, TBExG. In his brief talk, he shared key highlights of a recent survey done by American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) on evolving practices in ERM. This APQC study shares light in the following areas:
- ERM programme governance, reporting structure and benchmarks
- Prevalence of tools and techniques that organisations are using to identify and assess enterprise risks
- Practices for driving a culture of ERM throughout the organisation
- Measuring their success and demonstrating the value of ERM in their organisations
Thereafter, Maurice van der Sanden - EMEIA Risk Consulting, Enterprise Resilience Leader, EY, presented the ‘Emerging ERM Practices’. In his talk, he elaborated on the following four topics:
- Enterprise Resilience: Convergence of business continuity management and risk management
- Evolution of ERM: Integration into performance management
- Risk appetite and risk assessments
- NextGen Enterprise Risk Management Maturity Model
The following session, Amitava Mukherjee - Partner, KPMG, addressed specific questions from the group pertaining to use of technology for ERM. The session was moderated by Sanchita Mustauphy, Chief Risk Officer, Tata Capital. In the discussion, Mr Mukherjee spoke on how a company can incorporate organisation specific risk appetite, tolerance and threshold level to score to determine the appropriate actions against each risk. He also spoke in detail about evolution of risk function with digitisation/automation/cyber threats, digital risk framework, use of AI/ML/Big Data for risk management and management of risk in new age business models.
Towards the end of the session, TBExG conducted an online poll to identify periodicity at which best practice sharing sessions will be arranged for the forum and identify topics of interest. The session was very well received, and now the forum will have its next quarterly meet in October 2022, with SMEs sharing their respective best practices around the identified topics of interest
Participant Speak
The EY session connected ERM evolution to business performance and organisation sustainability. Extremely useful inputs to build ERM charter internally. KPMG session covered the well emerging critical role of digitisation from a threat and security perspective.
— Sujit Dixit - Head of Internal Audit, Tata TechnologiesThe session was quite useful. It provided good insights into the ERM framework both from a global and Indian perspective. While some new approaches suggested were thought provoking, the practical examples given provided clarity on some of the pressing areas in ERM.
— Sriram Srinivasan, Regional Head - ASEAN, Tata Chemicals