In the third and final post in this series about little known but high value capabilities within StratexPoint, we will discuss the Stratex Benchmarking capability which is made up of two parts of functionality within the StratexPoint solution. The first is the Analysis Group functionality, and the second is the Benchmark’s inclusion within a number of the StratexPoint Global lists.
Benchmarking is a management practice that has existed for many years and provides insights into how your business or business units compare. However, one of the challenges firms often face when implementing a benchmarking approach is sourcing comparable data on which to base the benchmarking approach.
To address this issue, StratexPoint provides two key pieces of functionality to enable the implementation of a benchmarking approach based on comparable data.
The Stratex Analysis Group functionality is designed to enable firms to be able to create ‘on the fly’ ad hoc analysis groups which can be populated with indicator, risk exposure and controls effectiveness data from across the Stratex Framework. Heatmaps and benchmark reports and dashboards can be generated to illustrate the benchmark data within each analysis group.
The analysis group functionality was introduced after requests from a number of our regulatory customers wanting the ability to enable their supervisory staff to pull together benchmarks using certain indicators from the firms they regulate to answer specific regulatory questions and identify outliers within their regulatory remit. This functionality was specifically designed to be used by business users and to support ad hoc analysis, rather than the structured analysis that is most often used.
For our commercial customers, the analysis group functionality can be used to provide benchmarks around areas such as IT Performance and Risk Management across similar IT teams, and Conduct Risk across various customer services and other business units.
An emerging use case for the Analysis Group functionality relates to the Senior Managers Regime (SMR). Under the SMR, firms will be required to certify that key staff are fit and proper people who are capable of holding their roles. This will have to be an ongoing process which will generate a significant amount of indicator related data. Using the Analysis Group functionality, the firm will be able to easily identify any weaknesses or outlier indicators from which corrective actions can be put in place to proactively manage the firm’s SMR obligations.
Complementing the Analysis Group functionality for benchmarking perspective is the automated benchmark generated in certain ‘Global’ lists within StratexPoint, such as the Global Indicator list. Within the Global Indicator list the breakdown of the status of the indicators are generated based on the data entered across the business. This status information can then be compared to individual indicators or a group of indicators to provide a benchmark across the business.
By providing the Benchmarking functionality from within StratexPoint, the solution can be used to drive collaboration and improvements across the firm, as well being used to identify areas where performance is good and/or risk is being well managed. Consequently, good practices can be replicated across the firm.
To find out more about tthe other little known but high value capabilities of StratexPoint, have a look at Part 1: Stratex Bridge and Part 2: Stratex Timebox, available on our blog for a short time only!
