Customisation and Implementation of STREAM® at Carl Zeiss AG
How Carl Zeiss AG uses STREAM® to manage compliance across their global business units.
Founded in 1846, Carl Zeiss AG is an international front-runner in the world of optics and optoelectronics. Since its founding, the company has successfully expanded worldwide, resulting in its presence in over 40 countries, with over 30 production sites, more than 50 sales and service locations and about 25 research and development facilities. Since 2014, Acuity Risk Management has had the pleasure of working with ZEISS on a global scale in a successful collaboration to manage their compliance and confirm assurance.
“It was easy to install and implement, as a result I was able get started in a matter of days, unlike other solutions which would have taken me months.”
The story in four lines
Customer
Carl Zeiss AG
Use Case
Global compliance management, information security risk management, control assessment
What Changed
Consolidated data across 40+ countries on a single configurable platform
Outcomes
Unified global view, automated workflows, personalised visibility by region
The Challenge
Our story with Carl Zeiss AG began in 2014 when they first identified an increasingly recurrent problem that affected how easily compliance could be managed across the business. With global expansion growing at such a successful rate, the increasing size of the company made assurance for information security risk management and compliance ever more complicated.
As a result, it was recognised ZEISS needed an effective system to manage compliance across their units globally by consolidating data on a single platform. By using such a system that could provide a complete company overview, ZEISS would be able to easily address challenges such as compliance reporting using their own in-house preferred risk and control assessment schemes. The challenge was therefore set to find the right software that could easily consolidate data across such a large-scale company, with the ability to monitor data in order to match their own in-house security standards.
Potential Impact
There is no doubt that the challenge faced by ZEISS needed to be resolved. With such fast-paced growth, Carl Zeiss AG's own security standards are subject to continual development and change; their constantly shifting business picture requires an adaptable framework for potential threats and control management. If this need is not met (as is often the case when companies are reliant upon collecting data using excel spreadsheets) then it gradually becomes harder to uphold standards, increasing the chance of inefficient risk and compliance management.
The Requirements
- Flexibility to be configured to match the in-house standards of the business by uploading their own content
- Scalability to meet their large-scale global growth ambitions
- Centralisation of risks and controls across all sites, providing management with a clear overall view of the data
- Ease of use for employees at all levels of the business hierarchy
- Automation of workflow to raise and assign responsibility and remediation activity to appropriate IT staff, escalations and reporting
Solution
Due to its ability to match these requirements, Acuity Risk Management's software STREAM® was recommended to Carl Zeiss AG by EY consultants. After a two-week competitive pilot process during which Acuity demonstrated the capabilities of STREAM®, ZEISS selected STREAM® as their solution.
It was clear that the most fundamental requirements were organisation-specific, so it was critical for the software to be configurable, thus Acuity made a personalised tree structure of all Carl Zeiss AG's global and regional sites. As a result, regional managers could get a different visibility to those lower down in the business hierarchy, an extremely useful tool for the overseeing of risk management and control implementation. Although STREAM® is not in itself custom-built, it is configurable in its ability to upload any special personalised functionality. For example, any content or workflow can be imported or exported. As such, ZEISS could have their unique content within STREAM®, ensuring that it was fit for purpose.
Another of ZEISS's key requirements was for the software to be easy to use for all employees within the company. Once Acuity had configured the content for their personalised version of STREAM®, we were able to visit the German company to provide training at a high level of the business hierarchy, which was then transferred further down the business line. Easy to use and maintain, the training for STREAM® was efficient and successful across the whole business spectrum.
“STREAM® was a complete game changer. We are able to configure customised fields to meet our requirements. This drives a big part of our customer satisfaction.”
The Benefits
Through using STREAM®, Carl Zeiss AG has experienced a number of key benefits from using STREAM®, including the ability to:
Easy compliance reporting
Automatic scheduling
Efficient risk management
Time and cost savings
Better reporting
What's next?
Acuity continues to work with Carl Zeiss AG, collaborating regularly on both existing and new uses of STREAM® within their business.
Scale compliance across your global operations
If you're managing compliance across multiple countries, sites, or business units, STREAM® can help you consolidate data, configure to your standards, and provide visibility at every level.
Acuity Risk Management helps businesses worldwide effectively manage, prioritise and report on their risks to inform strategic decision-making and build long-term resilience.
Its powerful STREAM® platform provides rapid time to value to reassure stakeholders that risks are under control and compliance is maintained with increasingly complex standards and regulations. With STREAM®, Acuity eliminates the guesswork around risk to support strategic decision-making, prioritisation of resources and justification of expenditure to maximise ROI. With customers worldwide, Acuity has proven success supporting customers in highly regulated and targeted industries such as finance, IT, telecommunications, healthcare, defence and government.