Are You Prepared for Large Scale Port Infrastructure Expansion?

The American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) just released its 2016-2020 Port Planned Infrastructure Investment Survey. In that survey, AAPA reports that U.S. ports and their private sector partners plan to spend $154.8 billion on port-related freight and passenger infrastructure projects between 2016 and 2020.  The biggest project investments will be in ports along the US Gulf Coast where $127.8 billion is planned to be spent in response to the need for new energy facilities and to handle the larger ships which are now allowed by the Panama Canal improvements.

Reduce Operational Risk and Increase Performance by building a Safety Management Process

What is Safety Management?

Safety Management is a process that applies to sensitive activities in a work environment to ensure that industry safety standards are met. Organizations are responsible for their employees’ wellbeing; proper implementation of a safety management process guarantees that risks are identified, assessed and mitigated. Safety management includes proper training and monitoring of employees with regards to necessary safety measures so as to prevent incidents and reduce hazards at the workplace.

The Challenges

• A safety management system is a planned process or procedure for carrying out a certain activity in the workplace. The reason you should implement a safety management systems is to ensure that when a task is carried out in your workplace, every precaution has been taken to reduce the likelihood of there being an incident that leaves someone injured or worse.
• In health and safety, ensuring an engaged workforce is critical. With employees embracing corporate health and safety objectives as their own, creating a safety culture with workforce participation is crucial.
• The best Safety and Health Programs involve every level of the organization, instilling a safety culture that reduces accidents for workers and improves the bottom line for managers. When Safety and Health are part of the organization and a way of life, everyone wins.

Our Solution

• Predict360 Safety Management Solution streamlines health and safety processes and best practices to effectively manage all aspects of your organization’s safety program with incident and regulatory reporting which enables organizations to collect, store, track and collaborate on safety compliance-related incidents. It has a built-in investigation feature that is tied back to the incident, streamlining your corrective and preventive actions (CAPA).
• There is a potentially significant cost savings to implementing a Safety Management System. The long term savings include implementing improvements and reducing hazards of processes and systems, the potential improvement in employee and equipment performance, and the savings of avoiding fines associated with non-compliance.

Key Features

• Risk-based audit capability which provides a comprehensive audit to evaluate compliance with the requirements to identify gap areas on which safety and environmental performance needs improvement. Audits are streamlined and your staff hours are more efficiently applied to the content of your evidence.
• Launch a corrective action plan or a preventive action plan based on the outcomes of a case, audit, risk assessment, survey or incident so you can address the root cause and not just the symptoms of the issues facing your organization. The system recommends the rollout of corrective and preventative actions through three modules: 1) Training; 2) Incident/Case Management; and 3) Expert advisory services through our network of top 10% experts in the subject matter.
• Regulatory Knowledge Base that contains an e-library of EPA, OSHA, DOT, MSHA and other key regulations, codes and standards which are translated in plain English and converted into business controls that are exposed simply on your graphical dashboard.

Try applying the following Five-Step Safety Plan for success at your organization.

FIVE STEPS FOR SUCCESSFUL SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Step One: Safety Audit

Perform a comprehensive safety audit to evaluate compliance with the standards and regulations. This helps identify gap areas on which safety and environmental performance needs improvement.

Step Two: Action Plan

Based on the results of the Safety Audit, launch a corrective/preventive action plan that addresses the root cause of the issues facing your organization. Predict360’s system recommends the rollout of corrective and preventative actions through three modules:
1) Training
2) Incident/Case Management
3) Expert advisory services through our network of top 10% experts in the subject matter.

Step Three: Safety Program Responsibilities & Key Roles

Develop Safety Program Responsibilities for all levels of the organization in order to provide a foundation for building the safety system.

Step Four: Management and Employee Safety Training

Train the line management to support, take responsibility of, and be accountable for the success of the safety system. For training employees on applicable safety topics, use computer-based training alongside regular line management “safety talks” with the department (5-10 minute daily/weekly talks) covering the same topic.

Step Five: The Safety Plan

A safety plan is necessary to provide a phased approach to achieving safety success. The safety plan should be developed with input from key functional areas, communicated throughout the organization and then regularly reviewed to ensure the plan is effectively being met.

Mortgage Lender Action Plan Automation through Policy & Procedure Management System Using Artificial Intelligence

Enterprise Risk Management Software

The Challenge

• Inadequate or poorly-documented manual solutions using excel or home grown tools with inconsistent taxonomies causes inaccuracies and incompleteness within the lending process.
• Lack of integrated lending regulatory requirements into the lending operation processes
• No sophisticated way of mapping regulations to the lending policies, procedures, lending documents and disclosures.
• If your lending firm is a complex organization with multiple branches, in multiple states and countries, doing volumes of loans, typically organizations don’t have an integrated system that enables them to figure out which regulations apply to which branch office, loan and which internal controls.
• How do you make sure, your people are reading policies and converting the required into an action plan?

The Solution

• Regulatory change management software based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Regulatory / Standards and Requirements Intelligence Library with common taxonomy and centralized for lending multiple departments such as Reg AB, flood, CRA, HMDA etc
• Operational risk and compliance technology based on artificial intelligence automates mapping of lending regulations, standards, requirements to your policies, procedures, internal controls, risks and audi management software
• Big data approach to regulatory change management not only allows Integration of current regulatory requirements into lending processes, but enables you to make solid decisions with predictable outcomes

Value

• Automation of concept mapping policies and procedures with the regulations and sending out automated alerts and tasks when regulations or policies change, drives operational efficiency, reduce cost, increases quality and happy employees. This is highly valuable when you are processing volumes of loans

A Case Study

Challenge: A large mortgage lender company was using sharepoint for their policies & procedures, another system for their regulatory change management, Archer for their task management system and DocuSign for e-signature. They had to use Archer because other departments were using it. Their challenge was that they had three different systems and none of the systems talked to each other. They wanted a system that would automate selected users to be alerted and tasked when the lending regulations or policies changed.

Solution: Since Predict360’s regulatory change management software, policies procedures mgmt. and internal controls library is a self-contained integrated tool and built-on artificial Intelligence technology, we were able to demonstrate how once upload a policy, into the document management system, it breaks down the sections within policies and maps them to the regulations or standards, send you alerts and automates the process of assigning tasks and action plans.

• Policy, procedure and disclosure document is all integrated product with docu-sign for eSignature including a workflow to accept, review, version control, e-sign and maintains audit trail.
• This automation of alerts and (CAPA) corrective and preventive action plan assignment process works in both scenarios – 1. If the lending regulations or standards change or if the policy and procedure changes.
• As the lending policies are implemented and as activities are performed, they are concept mapped to other artifacts in the system: Regulations/Internal requirements -> polices -> procedures -> CIP /EDN -> Controls – > Tasks.
• The below should explain how Predict360 uses artificial intelligence to concept mapping process to create relationships between disparate unstructured data; in this case a policy & procedure doc and a regulatory requirement.

How to Automate Tasks through Your Policy and Procedure Management System

Step 1- Policy & Procedure document either in word or PDF is uploaded into Document Management System

Step 2- The PDF or word format policy or procedure then is converted to HTML and then chunked into sections.

Step 3- Looking at the “Document Sections” you can see how it broke up the document into logical sections. Each section is concept mapped. When this is done, relationships can be created manually (“Associate Requirements”) or they can be suggested based upon the concepts that the system derives from the content.

Step 4. Finally, you can see in Unified Change Management (the home for requirements) how the requirements have been Concept mapped too. It is these concepts the system uses to infer relationships between content. The system tem automatically generates tasks to specific user group

If you would like a complimentary 60-minute advice on Automating Regulatory Change Management or would like for us to do a proof of concept for you, please fill out the form and we will respond within 24 hours.

If you would like a complimentary 60-minute advice on Automating Regulatory Change Management or would like for us to do a proof of concept for, please contact us

Automate Regulatory Compliance Management and increase operational excellence, agility, predict risk and implement a comprehensive compliance program.

What is regulatory compliance management?

Is a process by which organizations ensure compliance with relevant laws, regulations, guidelines and specifications. It is the use of compliance controls and the implementation of compliance requirements to identify and manage regulatory risks through corrective and preventive actions. Noncompliance with applicable rules and violations of regulatory laws and regulations may result in penalties, legal

Business Case – Scale Your Risk, Information Security, Audit and Compliance Consulting

The Challenge

·         Many small and mid-sized GRC Software consulting firms are challenged by the new climate technology has created. These financial services risk consulting firms are searching for ways to both overcome these challenges and to differentiate from their larger, resource-rich competitors. As one result of the search, we are seeing an “asset-based consulting growing trend” in the GRC consulting space.

·         Another way consultants can find value in existing business sectors is by making better use of their framework, banking and financial services specific content, data and workflows to actually improve on their IP. Without a connected way to collaborate and share IP, consultants fail to build on their internal knowledge base by leveraging the most successful elements of their engagements and frameworks. As a result, consultants never get intelligent or agile on their engagements nor do they substantially build on their knowledge their clients or the issues they tackle. The value of artificial intelligence and big data approach to GRC is picking up steam and causing disruption, and the consulting industry is no exception.

·         Banking and financial services governance, risk and compliance is getting complex and risk consultants gather huge amounts of data from their clients, and they should be using it to build their expertise around how to map their risk assessments to regulations and internal controls, do benchmarking against their competitors and build the best frameworks. This is not possible through traditional GRC consulting practices and manual processes.

The Solution

·         Face to face and paper based risk assessment, audits, tests and survey a are out dated, it has low participation and it takes months and costlier to your customers. Therefore, you can be an early adopter of artificial intelligence, big data technology towards GRC consulting that can automate mapping, building relationships between risk, internal controls, regulations and organizational data that can help consultants to gain the level of knowledge necessary to provide those solutions to its clients with quality, agility and reduced cost.

·         By productizing risk consulting business models and frameworks, consultants can better provide repeatable, trackable solutions to specific client problems. The focus thus lies less on the effort of the consultants conducting the GRC engagement and more on the outcome of the engagement itself. Likewise, the engagement can be priced around the output rather than the input. This would help transform consultants “one-and-done relationship” with their clients and get into a recurring subscription like revenue stream.

Value

·         There is a huge benefit to getting your consultants to use a single GRC consulting platform – it allows you to digitized and automate your risk framework, assessments, audits, compliance routines and action plans that is being used by all consultants on various projects. Further, it also enables you to automate benchmarking performance against your client’s competitors within the same industry. Over time you can productize the content, frameworks and workflows and turn that into a key differentiator- This will immensely help boutique to mid-size firms compete with the cream-of-the-business-school-crop talent that the top GRC consulting firms offer

·         Productizing your consulting will enable you to rinse and repeat and scale- This would position you to scale and keep on producing revenue without you being personally on the consulting engagement and continue to grow.

·         Once the consulting firm productized their GRC consulting services, all they would have to do is hire, train and delegate to other consultants- they can begin removing themselves from the tasks of servicing clients by hiring key roles and delegating those tasks. Or, if they prefer to stay small and work solo, the principals can find ways to eliminate or automate the unnecessary tasks and side-services that are low-value-low-margins to high-value-high-margins

• It would make sure GRC services more predictable and allows you more control and create a balance between quality, speed and cost regardless of who the consultant is. Once you’ve build predictability into your risk, compliance and Audit Management Software workflows, you will eventually build predictability in your revenues and costs.

Just because you’re selling your time chunked up into engagements doesn’t mean that risk consulting service needs to feel like hamster-wheel of death. If you’d like to learn more in how to Embracing the Product Mindset through Predict360 GRC consulting software, please fill out the form.

Detect potential violations real time with Predict360 Anonymous Hotline Reporting

What is Anonymous Hotline Reporting?

A reporting hotline allows employees to discreetly inform relevant management about unethical activities that were observed in the organization. Unethical activities include financial improprieties, sexual harassment, discriminatory practices, bullying or intimidation and conflict of interest just to name a few. A comprehensive ethics, risk and compliance program allows organizations to discover compliance issues through anonymous reporting and subsequently avoid legal liabilities and reputational risk by taking necessary corrective and preventive actions.

The Challenges

• Critical to a comprehensive ethics, risk and compliance program is a solution that allows organizations to discover compliance issues through anonymous reporting and to be prepared to take the necessary corrective and preventive actions immediately, avoid legal liabilities and subsequent reputational risk.
• Complying with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), SOX and other regulations requires a proactive defense mechanism to detect and act on probable violation issues.
• Companies run the risk of losing millions in fines for violations and noncompliance on top of the reputational fallout that comes with corporate scandals.

Our Solution

Predict360’s Anonymous Hotline Reporting Software provides prompt and valuable insight into potential risks and danger of violations of policies, procedures, and controls resulting in noncompliance and that can impact a company’s profits and reputation. Gain access to integrated reporting and communication tools to elevate accountability and achieve a risk-based culture within the organization.

It is an integrated ethics, risk and compliance solution that is built on cognitive technology that allows pattern recognition and artificial intelligence techniques that enable organizations to detect, predict risks and respond to targeted issues to ensure regulatory compliance, operational excellence, and an ethical workforce.

Key Features

• Provides a single centralized data repository for ethics, risk and compliance management including processes and controls.
• Facilitates collection of incident data assesses risk and follow-up recommended actions.
• Graphical dashboards, tracking of process ownership, risk assessment, risk analysis and remediation plan.

Four Steps for successful Anonymous Hotline Reporting:

Step One: Demonstrate Trustworthiness

Create a corporate culture based on respect of individuals, processes and company values by consistently acknowledging and rewarding ethical behavior. Employees are more likely to report misconduct in a culture that is known to value ethical behavior.

Step two: Give options for coming forward

In order to encourage employees to report misconduct before the company faces any financial or reputational consequences is to give employees a number of methods to communicate their concerns e.g. via email, in person, telephone, dropping a brief memo in a drop box at the reception.

Step Three: Maintain a clear escalation and dissemination path

Based on the severity of the issue reported and in accordance with a predetermined criteria, compliance officers should identify if the reported issue requires immediate action (i.e. within 24 hours) or if the matter can be attended to alongside other regular business operations.

Step Four: Single Hotline

Irrespective of the mediums employed (e.g. email, telephone etc.) having a single point of contact as a general ethics and compliance hotline allows companies to create awareness and promote the hotline more effectively and get an increased response from employees.

Operational Risk and Regulatory Change Management

Download our latest thought leadership paper from Ed Sattar Chief Executive Officer for 360factors. This paper focused on Operational Risk Management Software and Regulatory Change Management and was recently presented at the National Safety Council Texas Safety Conference & (TSCE) in San Antonio, TX

The National Safety Council Texas Safety Conference & Expo is an annual event for safety professionals looking to improve safety in their organization. For more than 75 years, professionals have turned to this event for industry-leading technology, education, networking opportunities and the tried and true products and services needed to stay at the forefront and remain competitive within the industry.

Key Issue’s Covered Include:

• Operational Risk & Regulatory Trends
• Why Automate an Operational Risk and Regulatory Change Management System
• Operational Risk and Compliance Management Model & Methodology
• How to Implement an Operational Risk and Compliance Management System
• Can Automation and Software Increase Operational Excellence and Reduce Risk & Cost?

Information Management Software

Drive efficiency into threat management initiatives through Information Management Software

Banking Integrated Risk, Information Security Compliance & Audit System | 360factors, Inc

Why Mortgage Lenders Company Not Implementing

an Integrated Risk, Information, Compliance and 

Audit Management System