Strategic Thought

Active Risk Manager >

 Product Overview

Active Risk Manager is the world's most widely deployed and only truly comprehensive enterprise risk management (ERM) software system, with over 25,000 users worldwide in more than 60 companies on 5 continents.

Originally developed to address the risk management requirements of large defence programs it now manages the risks of many of the globe's largest organizations across all sectors. To read more about the history of Active Risk Manager (ARM), please click here or on the link in the navigation on the left.

ARM is a COTS+ product. This means it is available as an off-the-shelf application. However, Strategic Thought can develop custom enhancements to meet customer requirements via a range of non-funded, partially-funded or fully customer-funded components of work.

All new features are added to the core product line, rather than developing software variants. Some features may be selectively enabled or disabled for specific customers ensuring that the software provides a comprehensive solution to your needs.

Strategic Thought's enterprise risk management software is guided by its product strategy, Closed-Loop Risk Management. Essentially, this promotes the gathering of risk information across the entire organization and from all positional levels, so that it can be analyzed and managed appropriately. We want to get the right information, to the right people, at the right time (in a secure fashion).

Simply put, ARM helps companies to make the right decisions, more often.

The philosophy that enables ARM to help you achieve this goal can be summarised as follows:

• Enterprise Risk Management requires all "currencies" of risk to be supported.
  
• It is necessary to break down individual risk silos.
  
• Risk should be communicated across the enterprise.
  
• Escalation must occur not just up and down the vertical structures, but also across divisions, e.g. IT Risk may impact the Sales division but who owns it and how is it communicated?
  
• The whole enterprise must contribute to the risk management process.
  
• Each organization will have its own risk "appetite" that defines the way in which risk is most effectively managed.
  
• Risk must be communicated in a manner appropriate to the audience.
• Risk can be an opportunity as well as a threat.

How does ARM deliver the goals of the above philosophy?

ARM aims to remove barriers of integration and interoperability, by:

• Integrating with established, best-of-breed products from recognized suppliers.
• Structuring our ERM software into components which can be easily replaced or upgraded.
• Using a web-based architecture which allows easy access from client machines over a wide area, and on a variety of platforms.

This means that we can take advantage of industry standard products such as Microsoft SQL Server for the infrastructure, and use Microsoft Project (Primavera, Artemis, Telelogic DOORS, Cradle and others also supported) for the Project Planning and Requirements Management packages.

The core business functions provided by the Active Risk Manager ERM software system can be summarised as follows:

• Capture of Requirements and Business Activity Breakdown structures, either directly within ARM or by integration with partner products.
• Risk Identification: capture of all possible risks into the ARM Risk Register.
• Risk Assessment: assessment of the severity of each risk using either a qualitative or quantitative approach.
• Risk Mitigation: putting in place mitigating plans and responses to avoid risks or reduce their impact.
• Risk Analysis: calculation of forecast project cost after taking risk into consideration.