Global B2B buy sell marketplace: bytrade.com


1 Establish an operational process flow baseline. Review operational steps and work flow diagrams within the company. Create a process flow of the overall operations to use as a baseline. If no procedures or flows are established or available, writing observations of the organizational process is a good start.


2 Highlight areas of risk within your operational baseline. Areas of risk are baseline process tasks that, if not properly executed, will cause a failure in operations. Highlighting the areas of risk can be done by reviewing each process task to understand where the flow baseline will fail if a task is not executed effectively.



3 Capture risk mitigation procedures. Once the operational baseline risk areas have back-up plans, establish risk mitigation procedures. Risk mitigation procedures are determined by several meetings with the subject matter experts or department representatives from various areas of risk. The mitigation procedures are then captured for review and final documentation.



4 Document steps of risk mitigation within the procedures. Using the results from capturing mitigation procedures, document in detail all action steps to take when certain issues occur.



5 Communicate operational risk mitigation procedures. Once all documentation is completed, publish it to the rest of the company to create awareness.



6 Review operational risk procedures on a regular basis. Once a process baseline is created, risk mitigation procedures are established and organizational awareness is addressed, set up regular reviews of your operational risk procedures. Regular reviews can be done via feedback meetings, issue resolution updates or by creating issues to see if your risk procedures work. The key in this step is to ensure that what you have established works to resolve issues immediately.



7 Update operational risk procedures on a regular basis. Part of operational risk management is to update processes regularly. Although operational issues do not change, the method for handling them will. An example would be e-mail systems which do not change in function, i.e., sending and receiving messages, but the technology behind them might. Updating operational risk procedures for new technology is essential for your organization to continue to operate.



8 Hire a person or group to be accountable for the overall management of operational risk. According to eRisk.com: “While it is true that operational risk management is everyone's job, someone needs to be accountable.” The success of operational risk lies within the overall organization, but a catalyst and leader are needed to ensure that operational risk is reviewed, updated, communicated and enforced, in essence, managed. Selecting the right individual or group will depend on the factory, as all companies have different needs, although two qualifications need to stand out: knowing operations and understanding risk