Vattenfall powers risk management with SAS® Enterprise GRC Solution

Energy and utility companies around the world are increasingly realizing the strategic edge that can be gained from exploiting risk as an opportunity. By implementing sound enterprisewide risk-management processes, developing a risk-aware culture and adopting state-of-the-art risk-management technology that entails advanced analytics, predictive modeling and what-if scenarios, today's energy companies gain a global perspective while improving overall performance.

Vattenfall is Europe's fifth largest generator of electricity, and the largest generator of heat, with operations in Denmark, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, Poland, Netherlands and Sweden.  Active at all stages of the electricity value chain -- generation, transmission, distribution and sales -- the Swedish company also conducts energy trading and lignite mining.

As a complex corporation, facing myriad risk exposures across its multifaceted business, Vattenfall has integrated and standardized its risk management processes and systems to holistically understand enterprise risks and opportunities. To do this, it has implemented SAS® Enterprise GRC Solution.

Complex business, scalable solution
"It's not only about operational risks," says Dan Mansfeld, Risk Manager. "When I say 'enterprise risk management,' I mean the entire perspective. Besides operational risks, we include political risks, legal risks and market risks -- we want to gather them all under one roof. We had several functions and areas within the corporation that would benefit from the solution, and we needed a platform that could scale to other areas of the company as well – for example, incident crisis management and environmental risks."

Mansfeld says the company began its SAS implementation by focusing on financial risk aspects and is slowly expanding to other areas of the company. Vattenfall manages about 1,000 risk measures in the system and has around 200 users.

"We wanted to establish a risk-aware culture," explains Mansfeld. "I believe we are on the right path; and what we have in place now gives us continuous reporting each quarter, because the workflow process is part of the solution. We didn't have anything like that previously. We didn't have a system for passing on the tasks or assignments to the different roles or users in the system. That is definitely a strength of the SAS solution. We have a better picture of the entire risk database all in one place."

Decision support for managers
"What's important about reporting is that you should be able to present it in different ways, for different recipients and it has to be comprehensive," he continues. "SAS is very strong in reporting, and we saw a huge potential for providing management with reports that they can drill into to get more detailed information, at various levels, to understand how the company or their unit is doing."

According to Mansfeld, the new system allows users to update risks measures continually and reports are delivered to executives each quarter. He says the risk-aware culture that is developing includes experts who assess the extent of risks and risk coordinators who collate and disseminate information. The risk-management group also facilitates regular workshops in which people from each area of the company discuss possible risk threats to the business.

A long-term relationship
Vattenfall sees many benefits with SAS. Key capabilities Vattenfall gains with SAS include: large data-volume processing, risk-event identification, quantitative assessment and incident reporting. In the future, Mansfeld sees the energy company taking advantage of SAS' predictive capabilities, for example, to assess production scenarios and hedge energy portfolios.

"We have an excellent relationship with SAS," says Mansfeld. "They're very professional in their approach and take customers seriously. We have every condition in place to grow with this tool into the future. This is not something that will taper off, but will develop significantly. They're really listening, and they take care to give the customer the solution that they want."

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