Risk Management Vs. Operations: How Do You Meet Both Teams’ Goals?

Your organization likely has two teams—Risk Management and Operations—that both have goals and objectives to meet, but many times have very different perspectives on how to reach those goals.

On one hand, the Risk Management Team likely isn’t as concerned about time, efficiency or even cost savings. Their main objective? Ensure that every individual across the organization, including subcontractors and third party vendors, have the right protocols in place and are doing their jobs effectively and with minimal risk.

On the other hand, the Operations Team isn’t as concerned about risk and protocol, but they are concerned about getting projects done with efficiency and cost savings as their highest priority. They’ll do anything to ensure a job or project is started on time and finished on time, while meeting the objectives.

When looking at each of the team’s’ goals, it’s impossible to determine which of the two is most important, because they both play a critical role for your organization. The problem occurs when the two teams are at odds and their goals aren’t aligned.

The Bigger Problem: Inefficiencies Combined With No Protocols

To illustrate how these two teams—if left unchecked—can actually make the processes more complicated, check out this math:

For every 100 COIs that need to be tracked in your system, you could be saving 40 hours each year. To put it another way, if your organization needs to track 1,000 certificates every year for your 3rd party vendors or contractors, you could be giving your team a whopping ten extra weeks of time to devote to other priorities during the year, just by switching to a more efficient certificate tracking program. Your team likely has many other responsibilities, so if the amount of time they are spending on certificate tracking could be reduced, they can focus on quality of tracking in addition to other priorities.

What is the cost of doing all of the steps from collecting certificates and endorsements to data entry to reviewing and issuing renewal requests and beyond? If your team is like many certificate of insurance administrators, they don’t have the capacity to be strategic in their role, and aren’t able to spend the proper amount of time on each item, which can increase the risk of errors and omissions or simple oversight, such as keeping all COIs up to date.

While it’s true that both teams are critical, if they don’t have checks and balances in place, the result can be the assumption of excessive risk paired with an extensive, manual process. This is especially true for your certificate of insurance tracking processes that we illustrated above.

Meyer Najem Case Study: Efficiency & Effectiveness for Certificate Tracking

Meyer Najem, an Indiana-based general contractor specializing in healthcare and commercial construction, has been in business for over 30 years and manages 500 subcontractors at any given time. Aaron, the General Counsel at Meyer Najem, shared his experience of using myCOI, which improved both efficiency and effectiveness of certificate tracking:

“myCOI has definitely given us more peace of mind. The team is made up of insurance professionals which helps to take the pressure off of me. I have another 100 things I have to do outside of chasing down certificates to ensure they are compliant. Now we take HALF of the steps we use to with our manual process. It still takes work, but it’s a different kind of correspondence. If we didn’t have myCOI, we would have to invest in another person to help in the process.”

Your Partner for Certificate Tracking

myCOI is a cloud-based software solution and exists for one reason: to help you handle the everyday tasks of managing certificates of insurance and protecting your company against underinsured claims, costly litigation and failed audits. The software and insurance tracking services are combined into an easy-to-use solution developed and supported by a team of insurance professionals and is built on a foundation of insurance industry logic to automate the COI communication process and ensure you remain protected.

Ready to Learn More?

Interested in learning more or want to see myCOI in action? Request a product demo or sign up for our newsletter to stay in the know.

‍