Deze strenge maatregel bracht een zekere vorm van bredere reflectie over de maatschappij met zich mee, over WC-papier tekorten, hamsterwoede, politieke steekspelletjes die sommige blijkbaar niet kunnen laten, de verminderde vervuiling, het klimaat, steun aan vliegtuigmaatschappijen of kleine HORECA zaken, dalende beursindexen en -koersen, en ja, misschien zelfs twijfels over het kapitalisme an sich, met haar inherente consumptie-verplichting en eindeloze groeiverwachtingen.

Op een meer persoonlijk niveau, gebruiken sommigen deze wereldwijde meditatieve maand maart (‘MMM’) om hun eigen professionele toekomst van dichtbij te beschouwen.

Stel, je bent actief als kennismedewerker in dienstverband met 10 tot 20 jaar ervaring achter de rug, expert geworden in je eigen vakgebied.

Maken we ter illustratie de volgende drie verzamelingen op:

• taken waar je goed in bent
• waarvoor je (degelijk) wordt betaald
• wat je graag doet

De groene intersectie van deze drie verzamelingen is je ideale plek!

De beruchte en beroemde “gouden kooi” is de intersectie tussen waar je goed in bent en waarvoor je goed betaald wordt, maar zonder dat je het (nog) graag doet.

Weinig of geen appreciatie, lastige interacties met collega’s en managers, lange dagen, onproductieve meetings, … vul het zelf maar in. Kortom, bore-out uit een doelloze onderwaardering of burn-out uit een volledige overwerkte situatie staan om de hoek, klaar om toe te slaan.

In dat geval voel je je aan het einde van een doodlopende straat en overweeg je misschien als uitweg de stap te zetten naar een zelfstandig statuut. Maar kiezen voor een zelfstandige toekomst is een moeilijke keuze, des te meer vandaag in deze merkwaardige tijden.

De onwetendheid, schrik voor het onbekende en angst voor inkomstenverlies zijn diep ingeworteld: Wat staat je te wachten? Welke stappen neem je best? Ga je voldoende inkomen overhouden om je huidige levensstijl aan te houden? Wat doe je tijdens onverwachte crisismaanden?

Ondanks je zoektocht naar informatie en antwoorden heb je geen of onvoldoende zekerheid gevonden of deze zelfstandige piste wel degelijk iets is voor jou. Je woelt en wroet in je eigen overwegingsperiode. Tenzij je op een gegeven moment een “gouden handdruk” krijgt, is het ontsnappen uit je “gouden kooi” geen makkelijke opdracht!

Laat je niets wijsmaken, niet iedereen is gemaakt om als zelfstandige door het leven te gaan. Niet iedereen is bereid de nodige opofferingen en attitudewijzigingen door te voeren, de mouwen op te rollen. Niet alles is rooskleurig. Durf de realiteit onder ogen te kijken, wees eerlijk in je eigen introspectie van sterke en zwakke punten. Heb moed om je vakkennis in alle eerlijkheid in te schatten, om jezelf de juiste vragen te stellen.

Zelf heb ik de grote stap gezet op 8 augustus 2008, één maand vóór de laatste financiële crisis. Over de jaren heen zijn het sindsdien ups-and-downs geweest, opeenvolgende magere en vette periodes, onverwachte situaties (waaronder nu dus ook een pandemie).

Was het op sommige momenten moeilijk? Ja.

Zou ik het opnieuw doen? Jazeker, ik teken direct met mijn twee handen.

Waarom? In mijn geval bracht het zelfstandig statuut me het juiste evenwicht dat ik op dat moment zocht vanuit familiaal en persoonlijk perspectief. Aanvullend was en is het nog steeds een verrijkende leerperiode, op tal van vlakken. Ik heb zoveel bijgeleerd, zoveel meegemaakt, en het is nog niet gedaan.

Is vandaag het beste moment om de overstap te realiseren? Waarschijnlijk niet, want de markt voor zelfstandige experten zal mijns inziens de komende weken en maanden zeer, zeer flauw zijn. Afwachten en jezelf goed voorbereiden lijkt me meer aangewezen. Tijdelijke crisismomenten zal je altijd meemaken. Deze COVID-19 crisis is niet anders, het zal op een gegeven dag ook voorbij zijn, in april, mei, juni of oktober. Crisissen kan je hoe dan ook niet vermijden, wees dus zen en leg voldoende cash reserves aan ter overbrugging. Wanneer de crisis dan voorbij is, sta paraat, klaar om kort op de bal te springen van alle nieuwe opportuniteiten die zich zullen aanbieden.

Kiezen voor een zelfstandig statuut komt erop neer om “ervoor te gaan” zonder dat je de zekerheid hebt over alle mogelijke implicaties.

Wees professioneel, wees doordacht, niet te naïef, en focus je handelingen en investeringen op het aanleren van de juiste stappen, diegene die je de meeste kans op succes geven in je nieuw leven. Je eigen weg zal pas duidelijk worden wanneer je deze bewandelt, wanneer je links beslist te gaan in plaats van rechts, en vice versa.

Ik wens je een goede en leerrijke reis!

Voor de personen die professioneel vastgelopen zijn aan het einde van een doodlopende straat, is het kiezen voor zelfstandig ondernemerschap een zeer moeilijke keuze door de schrik voor het onbekende en de angst voor inkomstenverlies. Ondanks alle aanwezige informatie, hebben ze nog geen zekerheid gevonden of dit hun uitweg is. Martin van Wunnik toont je een eerlijke spiegel voor ogen en geeft antwoorden op je onwetendheid. Hierdoor sta je dus niet meer alleen voor deze moeilijke keuze, je zal meer op de hoogte zijn van wat je te wachten staat als zelfstandige, externe expert(e).

Stuur me (in alle discretie!) een bericht via mijn website, een LinkedIn bericht of een whatsapp of sms boodschap op 0475/96.95.91 met je vraag.

Voor meer informatie, bezoek mijn website: https://www.martinvanwunnik.be

The first one is that the stock market evolution is a good indicator of the underlying economy.

If anything, those last weeks and months with Covid19 have proven that logic clearly wrong. On April 10th, with never seen new unemployment figures in the USA following the lock downs, the stock market had its record performance week since 1938.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted, this is when late stage capitalism takes a selfie on TV, showing two trends we believed should be in sync but clearly are not.

As the Dow’s registered its best week since 1938, an additional 16.000.000 US citizens lost their jobs.

Granted, the stock market hit a speed bump and went somewhat down prior to that exact moment, but you cannot declare that the stock market ‘crashed’ because of the worldwide corona-crisis. Some rich and powerful among us even became a lot richer.

I am aware that as I am writing this today, June 14th, the moment of reckoning could be soon.

More and more analysts are now worried about a second wave of infections, with its negative impact on earnings, EBITDA’s, shareholder values and other financial KPIs (and by the way on the life conditions of large portions of the public too). The biggest drop ever in the Dow Jones Index, not starting at 36.000 but at 25.605,54, might be something we will experience over the next months. Who knows?

The second misconception is that everybody wins and loses equally by having money on the stock market.

A 2017 study by Edward N. Wolff of the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests otherwise.

“The overall stock ownership rate (either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trust funds, or pension plans)… rebounded to 49 percent in 2016…”.

So, while indeed almost half of the people own some stock today, directly or indirectly, who profited most of the raising stock prices over the last decades?

“Over 90 percent of the total value of stock shares, bonds, and business equity, and 85 percent of non-home real estate were held by the top 10 percent of households.”

“The top 1 percent of households classified by wealth owned 40 percent of all stocks in 2016, the top 10 percent 84 percent, and the top [20%] [owns] 93 percent.”

It would thus be bizarre, to say the least, that government should step in should we face a huge worldwide decrease in stock prices, with large losses for the investors.

Let us not forget that the stock market is a closed environment by its structure; if somebody wins on a transaction, somebody else loses, and vice-versa. Obviously, if you were to hold on to your portfolio and not perform any sale transaction, you will see its value evaporate away during a bear market.

The act of offering government support to those that would lose on a possible falling stock market in the upcoming months, the top 20% that owns 93 percent of all stocks, falls squarely into the category of privatizing the benefits and socializing the losses.

There are other targets of government assistance in my eyes that appear to be so much more meaningful, more humane. In a non-exhaustive way, these targets include financial support for the unemployed, for those who lost their healthcare insurance as a result, for the poor, for small mom-and-pop stores that are on their way to bankruptcy as well as struggling SMEs.

Our “new normal” deserves it.

Reference: http://www.nber.org/papers/w24085

Within its reporting environment a CFO today has dashboards with many KPIs, ideally periodically redefined, data visuals with graphics, trends and pie charts, summarized and detailed PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheets.

This dashboard is automatically or semi-automatically fed with internal business data, whether or not designed with the help of hired IT or business consultants. Progressive CFOs also add some valuable external data to it.

What is the next step ? A projection into the future.

The questions a CFO should ask herself are: What is my objective? What will I do with it? Up to where am I willing to go? Is real-time reporting really needed for my own requirements? Her ultimate goal must simply be to provide added value by better forecasts.

It goes without saying that the activities of the company and its market play an important role in the way to find those answers. A production environment with volatile material flows is quite different from a services’ company only producing paper forms.

1/ For a meaningful future projection, the CFO must first search for historical trends, links and explanatory business drivers. Everything usually has trickle down effects. E.g. a significant increase or decrease in the price of raw material speeds up or slows down the frequency of deliveries by the suppliers. In addition, it might also trigger exercising specific hedging contracts.

Scenario analysis, what-if’s, A / B testing, customer segmentation, churn and cohort analysis are all examples of analyzing historical operational data. Eventually, they will obviously each separately have an impact on the financial figures.

Let us not forget a common and recurring topic here: the preventive maintenance of specific assets’ categories, together with their direct impact on related business operations and financial variables.

2/ Data enrichment, incorporating the right external information in the study to avoid a tunnel vision, is the next required step in the search for reliable forecasts. This would be from market penetration rates to economic growth expectations, past and future demographic trends and so more. Do note that sometimes the expected resulting impact might be very vague, unclear or simply wrong sometimes (think Brexit, the US presidential elections).

The CFO must be fully aware on the limits of the “expected occurrence power” of her calculated projections, to avoid a potential risky and in hindsight wrong strategy.

3/ Both elements above are instrumental in evaluating the predictive power of the available data and deductions. It is the job of the CFO now to understand the correlations, prove them and then use them as guidance, in close cooperation with the statistical or mathematical profiles.

‘Analyzing to simply analyze’ offers little added value. Financial figures and balances in general ledger accounts are only a reflection of the underlying business operations.

Predictive Analytics should, whether or not combined with big data and AI, be added asap to the risk management agenda of any CFO.

The purpose is to apply it where it is relevant and potentially has the most impact. Today, and probably for 2017 too, that still seems to be on the operational figures, straight from the “factory floor”, and not on the subsequent numerical financial translation. 

A few years ago, there was an unspoken consensus that the real multiple transactions players in “big data” were limited: the retail sector, with their personal loyalty cards, telecommunications, based on call history and perhaps the banks, as long as there was sufficient confidentiality with regards to their customers details.

The pertinent question today is: Do you now also fall into this category?

First of all, what do we actually mean with the term “big data”? In short, it refers to an approach whereby a data scientist uses specific techniques and analytical methods to find relationships and expectations, based on the data you provide. The saying “garbage in = garbage out” regarding the quality of the data still applies, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

Where it gets problematic for the average business these days is the size of its financial data, the foundations of the dataset. It is often small and only generated from internal sources.

Seriously, let us look at an ERP or accounting data. The number of records in identical format, the frequency and speed of storing the information can all be seamlessly managed using traditional Business Intelligence (BI) methods. Creating map-reduced datasets, these digestible chunks of information within a “big data” approach, makes little sense.

Such a “small data” BI solution usually does generate the appropriate answers, even more when supplemented by a well thought through data warehouse, or cube, built with a correct and frequent upload process (Extract-Transform-Load, ETL). Useful filters and zoom capabilities finish it off. Attempting to find hidden relationships within the data, another characteristic of “big data”, does not really any add value with such a limited statistical population, does it?

If “big data” has no role to play with regards to internal financial data, could it perhaps work out for external, public information or internal operational data?

Yes! For sure!

Possibly this is where the CFO can show its trump by guiding the organisation through mountains of information. By asking relevant “business” questions or outlining the right context, without only focussing on financial figures, she can lead her statistical and mathematical people in the right direction.

This is presumably the missing link to start having useful “big data” projects in companies and actually fits well within the picture of defining what the CFO’s duties are, within a much sought after role as strategic business partner of the CEO.

Martin van Wunnik – November 20th, 2016

Team A sees a clear hands, and shouts for a penalty.
Team B sees nothing special.

Like Schrödinger’s cat, dead or alive, both parties are 100% right until the observer looks into the box.

In our football case, the referee (i.e. the observer) is obliged by his/her role to do so and must decide: Penalty or Not deliberate.

Whatever decision this ‘neutral observer’ takes, one team will be angry, even furious, and disagreeing. The referee is neutral by definition, so his/her observation of the status of the cat at that moment, for that specific action (e.g. dead) will be valid for everybody.

But what when Team B deliberately faked innoncence, and thereby fooled the referees? The cat was actually alive, but they make it appear dead towards the referee.

Should Team A be mad at the ‘observer’, or should they be mad at Team B for their lack of fair-play? It is often the former (with sometimes additional yellow cards for Team A for arguing) although the latter would make more sense to me. In a similar way, consider the Penalty / Schwalbe (i.e. faking) discussions.

In all cases, the neutral observer played his or her part, opened the box and decided the cat was dead, so it is dead. Period. What is the logic of spending minutes, or even hours, for some on the pitch, others on the side lines or in television studio (with multiple slow-motions and image freezes from any angle, something the referee did not have), discussing that the cat was still alive according to them?

Football has and always will be a sport with passion, high running emotions and whether or not processed frustrations. All these aspects blur the objectivity and rational view of many players, not to mention supporters. Still, a neutral observer must be present and assume the responsibilities to open the boxes and decide. Let’s just accept that fact and the decisions taken by the referee, like good trainers do. They mention after the game that according to them, they deserved one or two penalties, and simply move on to the next game.

Funny that people tend to forget that no football game would last more than 5 minutes without a referee, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, depending if you are supporter for Team A or Team B.

Martin, one-time referee (2011)

Former football player N°24 at De Goldenboys MTSA (ex-SNAS)

[ Adjusted version from original post on 30/3/2014 ]

By now you have been working for several years with Excel, gradually getting better at it and making simple or elaborate spreadsheets for private or business use. All in all, you are quite satisfied with your work and the results.

If you recognize yourself in this description, please take 5 minutes to read on and answer these 3 simple questions.

Is that specific cell a variable or an output cell?

How many times did you decided “on the fly” to define one additional variable and simply use the adjacent cell to place it there? By doing so, you have just promoted yourself to the MASTER of this spreadsheet; where other users must scramble, search and deduce to find them. You are the single person on our planet who knows the levers and their exact location in order to modify the output.

In an effort to share your power of understanding to other users, they will be grateful, consider using visual clues. Use formatting (e.g. coloured fonts, borders, coloured fills) and by location (e.g. at the top of your tab with frozen panes, in a separate tab), to make a clear distinction between cells with variables and calculated/output ones. Furthermore, you might consider protecting the latter so that you are sure nobody will temper with them afterwards by mistake; not even yourself.

What is the difference between +M24, +$M24, +M$24 and +$M$24?

This dollar sign thing in Excel; do you really and fully understand it? Honestly…?

Because it is both important for the structure (e.g. valid copying of rows or columns without generating wrong references) and saves you a lot of time when creating your spreadsheet, here is the rule again: The first dollar signs before the letter locks the COLUMN when copying this cell, the second one locks the ROW.

Example:  If cell A1 has “+M24”, meaning taking over whatever value or text is located in cell M24, copying this cell A1 to B1 will give “+N24” in B1. Copying cell A1 to A2 will give “+M25” in A2, and “+N25” if it is copied towards B2.

How does this rule work out when you define tables with desired multiplications between the top row (say 1, 2, 3) and the first column (say 100, 200, 300)?

If you do not use any dollar signs in the first cell of your table, being cell B2 in our example, copying this cell “+A2*B1” for all rows and all columns will generate seriously wrong output. Your cell D4 will have the incorrect formula “+C4*D3”, i.e. 24.000.000.000.000 x 2.400.000.000 instead of 300 x 3.

When you use the dollar signs correctly, it all works out and the output is correct; with cell D4 showing “+$A4*D$1”, being 300 x 3 = 900.

Do I fully understand the functionalities and implications of VLOOKUP?

From a given complexity stage onwards of the problem you want to solve with Excel, you will encounter people telling you to use VLOOKUP in your spreadsheet. Next to your nodding, what are the basics?

The data you want to search or analyse consists of a table with one or multiple rows (or columns in case of HLOOKUP), where the key indicator in the very first one.

What is the key indicator? It is the variable you are going to use to look up for related data.

Let’s look at a table with given temperatures at three different locations. The user enters the desired location (i.e. a variable) in the yellow cell A1, and its temperature will automatically be shown in cell B1.

In cell B2 we use the formula “=VLOOKUP(A1;A3:B6;2;0)” to fetch, or to perform a “vertical lookup” in Excel lingo, the appropriate temperature of the entered location.

What are the different parts of this VLOOKUP formula?

=VLOOKUP(A1; …) = is the key indicator we want to use for our search, in this case the value “Bandol” in cell A1

=VLOOKUP(…;A3:B6;…) = is the table in which we are going to look. The different key indicators are located in the first column, from A4 to A6 (with A3 being the header), the related data (i.e. temperature) in the next column (B4 to B6). The whole table therefore goes from A3 to B6, headers included.

=VLOOKUP(…;…;2;…) to indicate that we want the second column of our table, i.e. B

=VLOOKUP(…;…;…;0) with 0 or FALSE to clearly state that we want to find an exact match, not an approximate match (i.e. the next largest value that is less than the key indicator should it be 1 or TRUE here).

If the location is not present in the data, the user will get an N/A error message, which you can further customize with a combination of IF and ISNA function, but I’m getting carried away here. Note that there are also other formulas you can use individually or jointly for table, array or matrix searches, like e.g. INDEX or MATCH.

Small intermezzo: You might want to define a drop-down list in cell A1 so that the user can only pick one out of the three locations. Remember that the user is never wrong – if the spreadsheet generates errors from any interaction with the users, the spreadsheet is poorly designed (i.e. not enough protected, not enough assisting the user with his/her choices).

Did you know the 3 answers? Great! Continue to enjoy Excel and all its ramifications.

Did you struggle a bit with these 3 questions? Consider taking a ½ day out to invest in your Excel knowledge on March 3rd 2016. I’ll be giving a practical Excel course at the British Chamber of Commerce in Brussels.

http://britishchamber.be/event/microsoft-excel-%E2%80%93-pivot-tables-vlookups-and-other-techniques

For those who cannot make it on March 3rd, I shall be organizing an Excel webinar series later this year, broken down by 3 topics per session. Send me a quick message by LinkedIn if you want to participate and I will keep you posted.

P.S. And don’t get me started on pivot tables…

Martin van Wunnik

http://arsimaprojects.eu/en/content/trainings-workshops

Brussels (Belgium) – Jan 16th 2016

Het klassiek verhaal van een patchwork van verschillende systemen en procedures was tot aan de aanvang van de 21e eeuw ook geldig voor Agfa HealthCare. Tussen 2000 en 2012 stapte daarom iedereen eerst over naar één globaal SAP-systeem, en werden vervolgens de organisatiestructuur en werkwijze geoptimaliseerd. Het ultieme doel was het stroomlijnen en verbeteren van de periodieke financiële rapportering.

Het oude beursgenoteerde Agfa-Gevaert Group (Mortsel, 1867) bestaat inmiddels uit drie divisies: Agfa HealthCare, Agfa Graphics en Agfa Speciality Products. Deze drie realiseerden met 11.000 medewerkers een omzet van 2,62 miljard euro (2014).

Binnen die groep groeide ook binnen Agfa HealthCare een mix aan ondersteunende ERP- en boekhoudsystemen en een veertigtal lokale entiteiten gedroeg zich ook sterk onafhankelijk. De enige interacties waren die voor de maandelijkse intercompany reconciliatie.

Die situatie hebben Ann Goossens en Karen Mattheessens gestroomlijnd, respectievelijk in hun functie van Global F&A Shared Services Director en Global Business Process Manager RTR. In 2000 werd er dus beslist om wereldwijd één gezamenlijk SAP-platform te gebruiken om daarna makkelijker optimalisatie-acties te definiëren.  De SAP roll-outs begonnen voor de 20 Europese entiteiten in 2000, daarna volgden de andere continenten met als laatste Noord Amerika in 2012. Vandaag werkt 95% van de divisie op SAP. 

Lees dit artikel verder op Slideshare (in pdf formaat):

http://www.slideshare.net/MvanWunnik/fast-close-at-agfa-healthcare-fd-magazine

“Fast close dank zij aangepaste structuren” bij Agfa Healthcare
Dubbel interview Ann Goossens & Karen Mattheessens

n°100, December 2015, FD Magazine

Now, over the years, which types of boostcampers do I usually meet again at a later stage?

The ones I usually run into again usually display the following characteristics:

1. They have a clear understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. So many starters think they solve world problems, but are fully oblivious to the difference between “must have” and “nice to have”.
2. They do not overestimate their expected value or price of “a good idea that solves a problem”. They have also understood that other aspects come into play in the minds of potential customers on deciding or not to open their wallets.
3. They are mostly teams. So, try to join up, collaborate, be more than just yourself (think Startup weekend events, where teams are created on the fly). Even better is obviously a heterogeneous team; where members complement each other rather than replicate. It is the combination and diversity of characteristics and capabilities that usually will bring you, as the captain of the vessel, further.
4. Finally, the “stayers” are the ones with holistic views and good knowledge on their “money matters”. Call it “quick and dirty”, call it “a back-of-a-envelop financial plan”, these starters have a firm grasp on their financial big picture of interactions and how to impact them. In short, they see the forest and don’t get lost in the trees. They often also consider subsidies in their scenarios. In my view, most nascent boostcampers tend to overrate the importance of external funding. Rather, they may wish to consider funding it themselves at the very start, get funding from their customers and/or suppliers afterwards, and only once they have a solid base and a cash-proof of your business, they might start to consider external funding. We should not forget that there is only a 1% (maximum!) success rate to get such funding after discussions lasting 8-12 months on average.

So, rather than  looking at the charges you want to cover with your sales, approach the matter the other way around: Find a solution for a real problem (in the lean strategy wording: get out of the building!); and be sure people will be willing to pay you a “fair price”. Based hereupon, define what kind of organisation is financially feasible, for now and later, and how you will survive the classical starter’s cash valley of death.

Finally, remember that, an idea is just….well…an idea.

Martin van Wunnik is a seasoned and experienced independent project manager for financial projects. Next to realizing projects for large multi-nationals, he is a financial coach and strategist for individual starters (mainly tech). Martin also provides workshops and information sessions for several public and private organizations (e.g. Microsoft Innovation Center, Sirris) and co-founded in 2012 the Finance for Startups-community in Brussels (transferred to the Betagroup in 2014).  Feel free to follow #MvanWunnik on twitter or browse through Martin’s previous presentations for starters on slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/financecoach24/ .

Companies that operate worldwide often face specific recurring issues with regards to financial risk management (FX, IR, Commodities).

If you believe you do not need a risk management dashboard, please have a quick but honest look at these issues listed here below:

• Complex environment

Need to rapidly adjust to the evolving regulatory environment
Competences required mixing finance, IT & regulatory knowledge
Number of counterparts (including new intermediaries and authorities)

• Data management

Complex data
Multiple data sources
Software “mess”
Too many manual processes or undocumented/unstructured Excel spreadsheets
Inadequate error procedures

• Managerial impact

High costs without real impact
Ex-post reporting more than ex-ante awareness

In addition to this all, the price of the software solution keeps rising, while useful results are still missing and the overall system proves to be not at all flexible.

Don’t you feel compelled by all this…?

FinBoard Treasury offers a simple solution to all these issues and transforms even the most complex data sets into a handy and flexible dashboard with financial engineering capabilities ready to help you in your métier. The manager can then dig deeper into the selected details to understand the figures.

This innovative software gets rid of Excel’s inherent limitations as a tool for data management, and offers almost infinite possibilities for simulation, segmentation and reporting, financial analyses and stress tests.

ARSIMA Projects [ phone: +32 (0)2 880 79 55 ] is now the official distributor of FinBoard Treasury (by FinMetrics) in Belgium, Luxemburg & Netherlands.

Further information: http://arsimaprojects.eu/en/content/finboard-treasury-0

Or by phone at +32 (0)2 880 79 55

 
Martin van Wunnik – ARSIMA Projects – April 10th, 2015

But does compliance reporting suffice?

Let’s take an analogy from the Doctor House series. In the E.R. waiting room, a man suddenly starts screaming in agony and running around in circles. Doctor House’s team suggest many different tests to cover all possible causes, to which Doctor House happily agrees in that episode, just for the sake to avoid having to perform hospital hours. But right before his team runs out, he tells them to also remove the cockroach trapped in the ear of that patient.

Being a risk manager, you do not have to be as witty as the fictitious character of Doctor House. However, building up towards your upcoming reporting cycle, use compliance reporting as a solid support to additionally consider to:

• Question the obvious
• Take extra time trying to further understand your own complex web
• Avoid jumping to conclusions and pre-formatted reports, thinking all answers have thus been given
• Simulate! Add more What-If scenario’s
• Decide if solely the existing compliance reporting does indeed cover it all
• As very often for many positions within a company, it boils down to aim to fully understand your own business, your company and its position on the market. Not in a “one-shot picture” way, but in an “ongoing movie-way”, over time, with simulations and possible scenarios.
• Compliance is surely required and greatly helps, but haven’t you overlooked any small insect still trapped somewhere…?

 
Martin van Wunnik – http://be.linkedin.com/in/mvanwunnik- Independent Project Manager