ERM

Almost three years ago, we were faced with the challenge of leading the new Enterprise Risk Management project for Cellcom; Israel’s biggest mobile operator.

With ever-increasing competition and operational complexity in the telecoms industry, managers are expected to achieve professional competence in their particular field and to identify internal and external factors and processes that might prevent them from achieving their own objectives and those of their organisation.

ERM should be part of every manager’s responsibilities, given its importance in terms of cost reduction, process improvement, efficient decision-making and mitigation of threats to their work. Some of the difficulties of introducing a new culture include inertia, impatience and lack of faith.

The challenge for us was to ‘sell’ ERM within the company, to create awareness and to gain buy-in at all levels of the business. We designed a process that enabled us, very rapidly, to hear feedback from managers and employees saying, ’how come we haven’t figured this out before?’

Our success allowed us to become experts in this huge area, discovering value within the organisation, touching hundreds of processes throughout the business, and being able to see and feel the enthusiasm of managers as they became aware of a real value-creating process and its tools.

Shlomi Drori		Yael Calo-Mor