Food and drinks giant Nestlé is deploying enterprise risk management software across its entire operation to provide a consolidated and consistent assessment of business risks.

The company is installing Strategic Thought’s web-based Active Risk Manager (ARM) to manage business risk across all sites, allowing offices in different countries to access and share data and monitor risk information more efficiently.

Marc Schaedeli, head of risk management at Nestlé, says the company wants access to a consolidated risk profile, as well as a group-level perspective and the ability to efficiently raise major group-level risks.

‘The key challenge for managing risk at Nestlé is organisation. The company has about 500 factories, businesses in more than 80 countries, and is a multi-product and multi-cultural organisation,’ said Schaedeli.

‘ARM helps to document the enterprise risk management (ERM) activities within Nestlé, and provides a better insight about these activities,’ he said.

‘We want a consolidated overview of data, with easier access which will help us get a better grasp of the business processes and their potential risks.

‘We plan to use ARM for both project risk assessment and business risk management. Nestlé products grow through innovation and renovation, and ARM will help us to manage any different types of project.’

Nestlé, which has its headquarters in Switzerland, will also use the system to handle forthcoming changes in Swiss legislation, which requires all large companies to provide evidence of their risk management processes by 1 January 2008.

‘ARM will help us support the evidence of having an adequate ERM process in place, and so fulfil the upcoming legal requirement,’ said Schaedeli.

‘We have rolled it out to key players in the risk management network in different regions and will start with the next level in the next 12 months,’ he said.

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