Operational Risk Management

Operational risk management is the process of identifying, assessing, monitoring, and mitigating risks that arise from a company’s internal operations, processes, systems, or external events. In Nigeria, ORM is critical due to regulatory requirements, economic fluctuations, and operational challenges.

• Reduces financial losses from fraud, errors, or system failures.
• Ensures regulatory compliance with bodies like the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) or SEC Nigeria.
• Protects reputation and stakeholder trust.
• Improves operational efficiency and decision-making.

• People Risk: Fraud, errors, mismanagement, or employee misconduct.
• Process Risk: Weak internal processes leading to inefficiencies or mistakes.
• Technology Risk: IT failures, cybersecurity threats, or system downtime.
• External Risk: Political instability, economic downturns, regulatory changes, or natural disasters.
• Compliance Risk: Breach of local laws, regulations, or industry standards.
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• Conduct risk assessments and audits.
• Use Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) to monitor risk exposure.
• Implement internal controls and process mapping.
• Engage employees in risk reporting and awareness programs.
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• Strong internal controls: Segregation of duties and approval processes.
• Staff training: Ensure employees understand policies and procedures.
• Technology solutions: Firewalls, backups, and disaster recovery plans.
• Insurance coverage: Protect against fraud, theft, or natural disasters.
• Regulatory compliance: Regular reporting to relevant authorities (e.g., CBN, NAICOM).

• A hazard is something (e.g. an object, a property of a substance, a phenomenon or an activity) that can cause adverse effect for example (water on a staircase, loud noise, asbestos dust).
  OR
  An inherent property of a substance or an occurrence which has the potential to cause loss or damage property, person or environment.

Risk is the combination of the likelihood of a hazardous event occurring, and the consequence of the event.

• It is the company’s commitment statement to a social and legal obligation for providing a safe and healthy working environment for all employees.

A safety program can be defined as the methods by which accident can be prevented easily.

• Is a systematic, objective, critical evaluation of an organizations health and safety management system.
  Usually, a lengthy process and may take a few days. It can be Walkthrough: It evaluates the unsafe condition noticeable to naked eye during work through the plant.
  (Stores, civil work, erection work) Intermediate: More details study and review of plant design and plant operation. Comprehensive: It evaluates the safety factors in the plant on the base engineering, analysis, testing, and measurement.

• A job safety analysis (JSA) is a procedure which helps to integrate accepted safety and health principles and practices into a particular task or job operation. In a JSA, each basic step of the job is to identify potential hazards and to recommend the safest way to do the job. Other terms used to describe this procedure are job hazard analysis (JHA) and job hazard breakdown (JHB).

• Emergency planning can define as control measures. It can control the accidents safeguard people and provide information to media.

• The management team should prioritizes the risk and evaluate the various risks according to three factors: impact, likelihood and velocity.
  If a company’s assessments already cover everything it knows can affect the business, why would it invest time in worrying about the unknown?

  A company’s current assessment is only a snapshot reflecting it knows today. But its risk environment can change in a matter of days, or even hours. So the risk assessment process should incorporate monitoring activities as dynamic as the business and the threats and opportunities it faces. For example, recent advances in text analytics makes it possible to analyze large quantities of text to identify emerging threats and generate alerts.

• A once a year assessment just isn’t enough for most organizations. It may be fine for “static” risks, but dynamic risks require ongoing monitoring. Consider the rate at which the risks to your organization change. Some organizations are developing near real-time monitoring capabilities for internal and external conditions using big data mining, text analytics and data visualization techniques. These mission control centers can feed actionable information to decision makers and form the basis for a dynamic risk assessment process.

• This is one of the tougher questions in risk assessment, and the truth is that there’s no commonly accepted way to measure avoided costs. But you can and should identify the range of potential cost avoidance, and the ability to do that has improved significantly in recent years. Also, don’t forget that an effective risk assessment may equip leaders with the information they need to take advantage of value-creating risks.

• Technology can play a big role in an improved risk assessment initiative. Technology can make it easier to micro-target particular audiences and risk challenges, analyze large amounts of data from different parts of the business and develop actionable intelligence. But technology is only as good as the underlying processes you have in place, and the people running them. Don’t expect better technology to do all the work—people are still required to validate and interpret results.

• Formally delivered criteria for control/risk reduction when undertaking pre-planned work that is hazardous, either because of its location or the nature of the activity.