Customer Value Story:
Illuminating Risky Blind Spots

The pandemic has disrupted operating models of businesses across the globe. Since the beginning, LogicManager has partnered with our clients to help them pivot and prepare. As we wrote about in our blog, our company was built on a foundation of seeing around the corner. In February, we rolled out a COVID-19 relief package to our customers. In May, we rolled out a Return to Work and Preparing for Wave 2 Solution package.

Over that critical period of time, we collected over 160 value stories from our customers about how they leveraged our guidance to drive their businesses forward. This series will delve deeper into those stories in hopes of helping other businesses throughout this challenging time.

Topic: Centralizing information and aligning your organization to safeguard from critical risks.

Company Profile

One of our customers is a large university located in Australia. Across their 5 campuses home to over 25,000 students, they pride themselves on offering an exceptional student experience. They maintain a reputation for excellence and rank in the top 1% of universities in the world.

In a normal year, this university must actively work to maintain their reputation by controlling risks associated with student safety, food service areas, transportation and much more, all while complying with a wide range of regulations imposed on the education industry. But 2020 is not a normal year; amidst the pandemic, risks are more threatening than ever before.

Challenge

As an educational institution, our client has always faced a unique set of challenges; promoting a safe and empowering learning environment for thousands of teenagers and young adults is no easy feat. Before the pandemic, the most top-of-mind risks at universities ranged from minor complaints to serious allegations – from hazing, to sexual assault, to alcohol-induced accidents and more.

When you pile on the monumental task of tracking staff and student safety amidst a pandemic, a formidable risk management plan becomes critical infrastructure to any university’s operating model. Since the beginning of this year, we have already seen more than 1,300 lawsuits in the U.S. alone against organizations that are failing to provide a safe environment for their employees and communities. In addition to the legal consequences, the reputational damage as backlash from the See-Through Economy can be severe.

In this high-stakes environment, our client realized that they lacked the ability to properly assess, address and report their risks. They worked out of an antiquated and manual system that was scattered across various departments and applications. Each department worked within its own silo, significantly elevating their risk vulnerability levels. As if these blindspots didn’t create enough potential for risks to catastrophize, our client also lacked formalized processes for managing incidents. This not only put their organization at a greater risk for negligence, but it also increased their community’s susceptibility to viral outbreak.

How We Helped

We began our partnership with this university in early 2020. Through LogicManager, they were able to bring all of their information into a centralized, all-in-one hub. This broke down the walls of their silos and facilitated cross-departmental collaboration. This transparency allows them to quickly connect their university’s risks to the controls, resources, processes and people that they impact. With a bird’s eye view of various metrics and incident remediation efforts, users can quickly and effectively determine areas for improvement.

This university now has the ability to provide top-rated data visualizations to key stakeholders through LogicManager’s reporting capabilities. These reports include:

• Top university risks ranked from highest to lowest, and displaying the top residual risks of each, in order to provide them with a list of their top 5-10 risks.
• Risks by root cause, or a root cause analysis, that breaks up risks and shows how they are assessed within each of their associated plans so that they can be identified based on how it compares cross-departmentally. This feature also includes the ways in which each risk is being mitigated.
• Most common risks associated with each department and the university as a whole, showing the number of times each risk has been added to a mitigation plan.
• Heatmaps by division, which provides a visual of how their risks are assessed within that division, as well as the top risks that particular division faces and how they are being addressed.

These reports are easily accessible to each of their risk owners so that all departmental risks and processes may be consistently monitored. Our client can generate these reports in just one day; before LogicManager, it took weeks.

To ensure that all faculty members can take advantage of the functionalities within their program, our Advisory Analyst team provided private group and individual training sessions. This has facilitated swift and effective completion of risk activities. Because of the true value our client finds in our software, they have been continuously adding users to their licensing agreement.

This particular use case demonstrates LogicManager’s capability to turn your risk management program into both an ally for keeping your name intact and a tool for preventing negligence to ultimately keep your organization and community safe.

Business Outcome

Because our client can track information at all levels of the university, they are equipped to track any information regarding the spread of COVID-19. Not only can they track it, but they can easily delegate users to implement the necessary mitigations. When regulators ask for proof that they managed the pandemic responsibly, they’ll have it.

But it’s not enough to just have a strong ERM program in place; if not everyone is engaged with the program, it will fail. This client broke down their organizational silos so that all of their departments’ efforts are aligned. It will be more important than ever to collect evidence that the risk mitigations set forth to prevent the spread of the virus were conducted by all employees equally in all facilities.

On top of that, they have access to our comprehensive content libraries and advisory team so that information about the latest regulations impacting their local area is at their fingertips. This way, they’re primed to pivot and elevate their efforts quickly whenever and wherever needed.

Aside from protecting their reputation and avoiding legal implications, this university is saving lives. Studies suggest that children and young adults play a major role in transmitting the coronavirus to vulnerable adults. This is due to the fact that they’re much more likely to be asymptomatic and go about their daily lives interacting with others in their community. With robust ERM software, our client can build a customized COVID risk management plan to enforce social distancing and public health mitigations. Beyond today’s unique circumstances, they are also positioned to manage their BAU risks to prevent the most common and detrimental incidents from occurring.

By addressing blind spots and taking a risk-based approach to protecting their organization, this client has truly prepared for tomorrow today.