An Integrated Approach To Risk and Compliance Obligations

Should you diversify your risk consultants and providers?

There is a common misconception many building owners and operators believe. The misconception is that diversifying your range of providers will reduce overall liability and risk for your portfolio.

In practice, however, we’ve observed that the more providers are involved in the process, the narrower the focus becomes. Instead, concentrate on a singular facet of overall property risk. Such as fire safety. This focused concentration limits the ability to keep a holistic view of risk for the entirety of your assets.

Failing to do so also invites a range of shortfalls. In your ability to enhance life and building safety. In your ability to coordinate data. And your ability to proactively manage your risk and compliance objectives.

It’s especially important now to utilise a single provider to cover each of your responsibilities. From the fundamental regulatory or legislative frameworks and routine inspections over to the human aspects of risk and safety.

How an integrated approach will close gaps in your current strategy

First, we can effectively define property risk across three key considerations. Many of these considerations directly affect or interrelate with one another.

Life safety

Factors immediately affecting your staff and occupants’ health and wellbeing.

Building safety

Spanning the responsibilities of owners and facility managers across utilities and resources implemented to mitigate risks across the asset environment.

Environmental risk

Culminating in the greater built-environment. A sum of the above factors plus changing conditions in and around the site itself, from public works and events to construction and maintenance.

3 core practices of risk and compliance

Understanding each of these tiers within risk is part of the way we have countered this issue. We provide integrated risk services and shared expertise across 3 core practices.

Emergency planning

Spanning environmental factors such as emergency management plans and evacuation diagrams to human factors, including training. The occupant safety aspect can also be further enhanced beyond regulatory requirements with immersive training and tools.

Property risk

Enabling clients to see and manage the inherent risk profile of assets. Also, assist in managing site-specific risks. From hazmat and asbestos to work health and safety (WHS) and hygiene.

Essential safety measures

Ensuring a continued plan to maximise occupant safety and meet necessary requirements at all times. We achieve this by maintaining a consistent approach to regulatory and legislative criteria, audits, inspections, testing and reports.

The overall aim of an integrated approach is to unify the information between these layers to deliver control. And additionally, to establish oversight of risk management and mitigation.

Enhance your capabilities with digital integrations 

Engage a supplier that allows you to utilise the wealth of new and emerging technologies. A supplier that can perform multiple services at once within a digital inspection. This enhances your capabilities in obtaining and utilising data. Additionally, it better informs key decisions in real-time.

This presents the added benefit of reducing requirements for procurement. Additionally, it establishes an easier way to manage contractors and on-site personnel.

To do this, we gather this wealth of information and showcase it through our online portfolio management platform, Infinity. Infinity is a central data management, reporting and integration platform. The platform allows you to understand risk across the entire asset portfolio as a single source of truth.

You can store your data from all workflows in one location, making information easily accessible and shifting users away from reactive work. The digitised approach directly supports this by capturing more information within a reduced timeframe.

 

Risk assessment and mitigation framework

Our risk assessment and mitigation framework uses this data to provide a complete risk profile rating across assets. The existing condition and compliance of the facility are assessed and audited against several risk or compliance categories. Additionally, data is captured through digital inspections to directly suit your portfolio requirements.

This insight forms the basis of your priorities across each site to resolve issues, planned maintenance and critical works.

You can, for example, look across a building and identify that there are not enough wardens assigned. You can see that multiple defects have not been rectified. Or ascertain that WHS and environmental compliance criteria have not been met.

Without having this information in one place, you cannot correlate data and make effective decisions for the whole of a building or the greater portfolio.

More to the point, having this oversight will allow you to strategically plan and manage the safety of each occupant. Additionally, you can maintain the longevity of your risk preparedness and the infrastructure that supports this.

Integrate your approach to risk and compliance 

To sum up, approaching risk and compliance via an integrated approach is a far more efficient and cost-effective process. The integrated approach also enhances life safety at all levels. It’s about resolving disconnected practices and effectively centralising their outcomes. As a result, you can reduce your risk profile via a reliable data-driven view.

At Hendry, we have implemented a future-focused approach. We go beyond quality and expertise to develop and integrate the latest in tech. From solutions spanning immersive technologies over to our new app ‘headsup’, which you’ll hear more about soon.