How data treatment can transform risk management

Sonny Brandtner, Tim Bruhn, Louise Garrett
5/16/2023
How data treatment can transform risk management

Crowe specialists weigh in on the latest issues in risk management and the data solutions they’ve created with clients.

At the 2022 TXBizCon, we heard from two Crowe consulting specialists on emerging issues in risk management: Tim Bruhn in healthcare internal audit and Louise Garrett in healthcare risk. Here are the highlights from their session. 

Current issues in risk management

Businesses today are not immune to wide-ranging risk management issues, including scenarios when:

  • Leadership expects to reduce costs and increase productivity, which places pressure on staff. Risk management processes tend to be manual and intensive, and they take a lot of time.
  • The risk landscape always is changing, which means there's a lot to cover.
  • The data sources and intel often are disparate and difficult to integrate, which creates an extra layer of confusion.
  • Industry technology is expanding and being upgraded, but not as much in the area of risk management.  

 How can a risk management department keep up? 

Digital transformation

Crowe Analytics Advisor, our data analytics application, can help you anticipate issues before they happen by regulating, managing, and analyzing data. The tool can help through: 

  • Regular data feeds and access
  • Risk indicator analytics and performance control testing to empower teams
  • Automation and monitoring for continual improvement

Through grouping data and expanding the monitoring activities around risk, your organization can reduce confusion and increase efficiency.  

Case examples

Financial services
Healthcare
Financial close controls
Financial services

Scenario

Bank X uses hundreds of third-party services, which must be periodically inventoried and assessed for risk and other due diligence. This process takes time and resources, and Bank X is struggling with measuring completeness and accuracy.

Solution

Instead of manually reviewing the accounts-payable register, Crowe performs a data analysis to chart recent history of payments and determines which vendors are still active. Deployed anomaly detection and rules-based analytics help identify unusual payments.

Result

Several hundred third-party vendors are narrowed down to fewer than one hundred, eliminating nonactive and duplicate vendors. Anomaly detection helps to identify duplicate payments and determine underlying root causes, resulting in prevention of financial loss.

Business results

Bank X benefits from real-time cost savings by reducing effort and duplicate payments, all while improving ongoing risk management processes.

Healthcare

Scenario

Hospital Y uses an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool without any role-based access in place. Approvals often are given for purchases that shouldn't have been made, and it's affecting the hospital's bottom line.

Solution

Hospital Y engages Crowe to help with data analytics and continuous monitoring. Management now is able to get a clearer view of all purchases, who made the purchases, and the time stamps.

Result

Hospital Y is able to see risks more clearly, address and manage them directly, and create the appropriate controls in their ERP to automate purchasing going forward.

Business result

Hospital Y has visibility into their transactions and monitoring in place for purchasing, both of which save a significant amount of money each year.

Financial close controls

Scenario

Client Z is experiencing numerous out-of-period adjustments to its financial statements, even though it seems to have the right controls in place.

Solution

Crowe uses analytics during the financial close process to identify anomalies in transactions and system journal entries that might have resulted in out-of-period adjustments. Concentrated effort is spent digging for the issue that's causing the imbalance and correctly automating the process to eliminate the problem going forward.

Result

The anomalies are discovered during the financial close, and the issue is resolved. Client Z stops experiencing out-of-period adjustments.

Business result 

Thousands, if not millions, of dollars are saved each year.

Summary

Risk assessment can become unwieldy due to the sheer amount of data to pore through when a problem arises. With our proprietary technology and specialist expertise, it's possible to automate these risk-detection processes, which can help save significant time, energy, and resources.

Listen to the full session

Contact us

Sonny Brandtner
Sonny Brandtner
Partner, Consulting
Tim Bruhn
Tim Bruhn
Senior Manager, Healthcare Consulting
Louise Garrett
Louise Garrett
Kodiak Solutions