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 Essent Case Study (10/07/2007)

Energy company turns on ARM from Strategic Thought for Asset & Enterprise Risk Management

Risk management is an integral part of the energy distribution business. Every high voltage network is designed with redundancy built in so that in the event of a failure it will still operate. The secret is to find a balance between the cost of mitigation of potential failure and the benefits that the extra investment provides.

Ype Wijnia, Risk Manager, Asset Management, Essent Netwerk BV explained, “To run the network we have about 1000 different types of assets. Each type of asset has its own failure modes and failure probabilities so the total risk volume is many thousands of things that can go wrong. To manage that amount of risk you need a dedicated software tool. Prior to the installation of Active Risk Manager we used Excel, Powerpoint and Word documents but it became increasingly difficult in terms of version control for analysis and comparison purposes.”

Why Active Risk Manager?
Because of the constant expansion of the network the decision was made to look for a system to control the increasing number of risks.  Essent Netwerk selected Active Risk Manager from Strategic Thought as it is a complete enterprise risk management solution and its structure mirrored Essent’s existing method of working.  

According to Ype Wijnia, “It was almost as though Active Risk Manager had been specifically written for Essent.  Our risk process complies with the PAS 55 Standard used by other major energy networks and developed by the Institute of Asset Management.  It defines a certain number of steps and all of those are found in Active Risk Manager.  The solution has more than a 90% overlap with our process and way of working – so it was a natural choice.”