Risk Management In DHL Express: Policies, Procedures, And Strategies Essay.

Understanding of risk governance in DHL Express

Discuss about the Management of Risk DHL Express.

The current assignment aims to provide a critical demonstration of the risk governance and management in the chosen global logistics organisation, DHL Express. As commented by Baxter et al. (2013), the event manager is responsible for planning and executing global conferences that include greater delegations, events, senior meetings and field visits. Therefore, the focus of the organisation is to manage risk in these areas of work.

DHL Express has well-established risk management system, which has enabled the organisation in identifying the risks at all stages. In this context, Christopher (2016) suggested that effective risk management system helps an organisation in adopting necessary measures for ensuring continual growth. The event manager of DHL Express is responsible for continuous monitoring and analysis of the global security situation. In addition, the personnel is responsible for preparing forecasts and facilitating business activities in places by considering the security risk.  

DHL Express has formed a global IT security platform to conduct strategic evaluation of the potential security risks in its global supply chain (Dhl.de 2017). It has been observed that DHL Express has adopted a system based on hierarchical reporting to sort out queries and seek approvals. Therefore, it is the duty of the event manager to involve all the managerial levels in the process of risk management. Moreover, the event manager could report event risk before two weeks on an ad hoc basis.

DHL Express has four operating divisions and there are segregated divisional headquarters to control each division. These are further segregated into business activities to meet reporting needs, which are depicted as follows:

Mail division:

In this division, the organisation delivers global and global parcels, as the organisation is experienced in dialogue marketing, services related to press distribution and other electronic services. In addition, with the introduction of E-post brief product, DHL Express has provided secured and “user-identified written communication” on internet.

Express division:

This division of DHL Express is engaged in providing courier mad express services to the business customers in over 220 nations. As a result, it has been the most comprehensive global network in the logistics industry (Franks et al. 2014).

Freight and global forwarding division:

This division manages the carriage of goods via rail, air, road and sea. In terms of freight operator, it is the best in the world, second best in terms of ocean freight operator and leading overland forward forwarders in EU.

Organizational structure of DHL Express

Supply chain division:

The division of supply chain is the international market leader in contract logistics, which provides warehousing and manages value-added services and transport at all supply chain links for the different industrial customers. In addition, the organisation provides solutions related to corporate information for tailoring the customer needs (Galliers and Leidner 2014).

Figure 1: Organisational structure of DHL Express

(Source: Dhl.de 2017)

The event manager undertakes the following policies and procedures for managing the risks related to global conferences:

Identification and assessment of risk:

Before arranging any global conference, the event manager dissects the opportunity and risk situation three months before the conference and documents the deed taken. The event manager then apportions the identified risk to one or more managers assessing and monitoring the risk. After that, the event manager lays down probable procedures to proceed ahead for filing a report. The same procedure is followed in case of opportunity, in which the results are stored in database of the organisation.

Aggregation and reporting:

After sending the report, the controlling units accumulate the outcomes and review the same for plausibility. In case, there is overlap in financial impact, the same is noted in database. After seeking the approval from departmental head, the outcomes are handed over to the next hierarchy level. The final level is complete at the time corporate controlling reports to the board group on considerable opportunities and risks and their impact on each division (Haimes 2015).

Overall strategy:

Based on the report obtained, the management of DHL Express selects the methodology to be used for evaluating and reporting on risks and opportunities. In addition, such report contains an additional information source for entire steering of the group.

Operational measures:

The necessary measures to be applied are ascertained within the individual organisational units. Each unit develops cost-benefit analyses to determine the ways of avoiding or mitigating the risks or transfer the same to other parties.

In the words of Peng, Peng and Chen (2014), the activity of stakeholder engagement is proactive dialogue. In case of DHL Express, this is broad due to large number of suppliers, shareholders, customers, societies, governmental and non-governmental organisations. In addition, the organisation has worked in sensitive areas and it is at the middle of challenging complexities like high-risk operations and considerable consumers of resources. Thus, involving the external stakeholders to the team arranging for conference implies listening to problems, identification of material issues and benchmarking performance in contrast to expectations. In addition, it is possible to accumulate input for organisational activities and priorities and give feedback, which would help in eliminating the conference risks (Pritchard and PMP 2014).

The following methods could be used for involving stakeholders in the risk management process of DHL Express:

• DHL Express could involve the stakeholders in its risk management for enhancing the understanding of a specific issue by using policy dialogues. With the help of these dialogues, common ground could be framed for future interactions. As a result, it would help the event manager of DHL Express to resolve sharp conflict and opposing opinions and beliefs.
• DHL Express could use surveys for generating information regarding knowledge, beliefs and opinions of a diverse group of stakeholders. By properly executing this method, DHL Express could ascertain the extent to which different perspectives depict the broader views of the general population. Thus, with the help of external stakeholder engagement, the event manager would be able to mitigate the security risk associated with global conferences through field visits and meetings.

References:

Baxter, R., Bedard, J.C., Hoitash, R. and Yezegel, A., 2013. Enterprise risk management program quality: Determinants, value relevance, and the financial crisis. Contemporary Accounting Research, 30(4), pp.1264-1295.

Christopher, M., 2016. Logistics & supply chain management. Pearson UK.

Dhl.de. (2017). DHL. [online] Available at: https://www.dhl.de/en.html [Accessed 11 Feb. 2017].

Franks, D.M., Davis, R., Bebbington, A.J., Ali, S.H., Kemp, D. and Scurrah, M., 2014. Conflict translates environmental and social risk into business costs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(21), pp.7576-7581.

Galliers, R.D. and Leidner, D.E., 2014. Strategic information management: challenges and strategies in managing information systems. Routledge.

Haimes, Y.Y., 2015. Risk modeling, assessment, and management. John Wiley & Sons.

Peng, M., Peng, Y. and Chen, H., 2014. Post-seismic supply chain risk management: A system dynamics disruption analysis approach for inventory and logistics planning. Computers & Operations Research, 42, pp.14-24.

Pritchard, C.L. and PMP, P.R., 2014. Risk management: concepts and guidance. CRC Press.