Risk management
Like all businesses, Alliance Boots continues to face a variety of risks. We have a structured approach to identifying, monitoring and assessing significant risks and the steps we take, where necessary, to mitigate them.
Our executive Directors and the Director of Internal Audit & Risk Management continue to play the leading role, monitoring the overall risk profile and regularly reporting to the Board through the audit committee. The process of risk identification is facilitated by the use of risk registers for Alliance Boots, and for each business. In addition, the Board through the executive Directors is responsible for determining clear policies as to what Alliance Boots considers to be acceptable levels of risk. These policies seek to enable employees to use their expertise to identify risks that could undermine performance and to devise ways of bringing them to within acceptable levels.
Where we identify risks that are not acceptable, we develop action plans to mitigate them with clear allocation of responsibilities and timescales for completion and ensure that progress towards implementing these plans is monitored and reported upon.
We believe that this demonstrates good governance in action, underlining our determination to meet our corporate social responsibility commitments to all stakeholders.
Key amongst the types of risk faced by Alliance Boots are: the macro economic and political environment, the impact of regulation; changes and trends in consumer behaviour; competition; health, safety and environmental risks; product/services risk; major operational business failures; increased costs; change management; acquisitions; currency exchange; funding and interest rate risks; pension contributions; and data protection.
We seek to mitigate risks associated with health, safety and the environment by setting standards throughout the Group which are closely monitored and regularly audited. Health, safety and environmental incidents are logged and analysed in order to learn the necessary lessons. Any major incident is promptly reported to and investigated by the Group’s executive committee.
“We use our expertise to identify risks that affect all aspects of our Group and we put considerable value on offering an effective means to respond to those risks in a socially responsible manner”
Back to top