Asia’s Eureka moment goes global

ACE’s Asia-Pacific head of risk management engineering services Raimund Navakas (pictured) is the driving force behind Eureka, a web-and-tablet-based integration of the firm’s underwriting and risk engineering systems.

And, as he tells StrategicRISK, he’s just a little bit proud of Eureka’s recent global rollout.

“We’ve been piloting Eureka in Asia-Pac since July 2012, and then we put the rest of the world onto it,” Navakas says.

“The UK and Ireland came on board in the last quarter of last year, and then we had the US, Europe and Latin America all come on board this year.

“It’s now being used by all property engineers for ACE around the world, so it’s a truly global platform.”

Navakas, who was appointed head of ACE’s risk engineering operations in Asia in 2009, says that Eureka provides “a global benchmarking and risk improvement system for our clients”.

“You can benchmark a hotel against a similar hotel, or you can benchmark against the whole leisure and entertainment sector,” he says.

“Whether they’re in the retail space, or if they’re manufacturers, or if it’s an airport or a hospital, we can now benchmark them against every similar retail, manufacturing, hospital or airport risk around the world that we cover.”

Snapshot view

Eureka also allows risk managers to benchmark on an individual basis in their own portfolio.

“It gives a snapshot view that a risk manager can present to his board that says ‘here are the facts about what the main issues or problems are that we may find and how we rank against, say, every other department store in the world’,” Navakas says.

“A risk manager can come up to us and say, ‘I’ve got this shopping centre; from a risk perspective, how does this compare to my warehouses and office buildings, because I want to make sure that my procedures and policies are in place for all our properties?’

“The benchmarking takes into account the thousands of sites that we survey every year; we actually rate them on a number of levels, the key drivers of the risk exposures and how the companies deal with them.”

New lessons

Sydney-based Navakas believes that Eureka has considerably enhanced the work efficiency of ACE’s risk engineers.

“It has also significantly augmented our value proposition to our clients through its enhanced benchmarking capability, onsite views of risk surveys and faster turnaround time for report completion,” he says.

“We have new lessons from losses facility and we’re building up a database of some of the losses we have had with clients.

“We’re coming at risk engineering from a more practical level trying to share with clients what’s happening and how to minimise risk.”

Navakas says that it is often about working out how a loss can be prevented through a change in simple procedural matters.

“The simple stuff that you can do; working out what will give you the best ‘bang for buck’ that will have a major impact on your bottom line by avoiding a claim,” as he puts it.