Archer Integrated Risk Management Platform vs. Ideagen Risk Management

Archer is better suited for an environment that has at least some maturity in its program, whatever that program may be. If an organization does not know stakeholders involved, or the workflow for its own process, or has the technology in place to perform vulnerability scans, then Archer will probably not be much help. If an organization knows these items, but it's all paper based or in Excel spreadsheets, or they are struggling to report on them, or notify an individual when it is their time to take action in a process, then Archer can be a tremendous help.

Incentivized

Pentana is great for monitoring PIs and risks. We find it less helpful for monitoring projects (with the Actions module); it isn't quite flexible enough for our needs, though the support team have been very helpful in adding custom fields for us.

• Integration capabilities to multiple enterprise systems
• Control standards and Procedures to address multiple regulatory/authoritative sources, standards and frameworks enabling test once satisfy many requiremnts
• Rapid application development and User friendly tool with configuration capability to customize easily without user requiring programming or coding skills

• Pentana is excellent for monitoring, recording and reporting on PIs. Very easy to use the PI module.
• Pentana is excellent for monitoring risks at various levels (service, strategic etc.). Risks are displayed very clearly in a tree structure and the module is relatively easy to use.

• They release time to time updates, which causes issues in the GUI. However, one has to be careful while installing the update.
• There is no open and free academy to learn more about the tool.
• One cannot stay to a particular product version, they have to move to the next version to keep up with the changes.

Incentivized

• Pentana could improve the free Documents module that comes with Pentana Risk. At the moment documents have to be linked to an action in order to display query results (such as how many documents are due for review) - this can be confusing for users who don't understand why there is an action linked. There is also no easy way for users to see the documents that are assigned to them.
• We would like to use the Actions module fully in order to monitor our corporate projects, but it a bit confusing for users and not very flexible when a project doesn't mirror Pentana's way of monitoring actions.

Good tool to get the information communicated, approval workflow, and easy to add new findings/questionnaires. Seems to be compatible with different browsers and little downtime. Only request for improvement is to add an export feature with fewer clicks. Maybe batch export.

Incentivized

Some modules are more user-friendly than others. It's sometimes not obvious where to click to update the fields (or even that field titles can be clicked on). We have written 'Howdys' to help users. There can also seem to be a lot of steps/clicks to updating risks and actions. The Reports module on Pentana classic is certainly not user-friendly, particularly the Report Layout and Charts modules - we were told these would be integrated into the web version but this hasn't happened yet.

Our RSA Archer team is dedicated to finding solutions for our organization. They haven't mentioned any issues with receiving support with deployment or bug fixes, and generally the platform is very dependable. They are always very excited about delivering a version upgrade and presenting any new features that provide more dashboards or chart types.

Incentivized

The support team are excellent and always answer queries promptly. They are very helpful.

Microsoft Dynamics is a useful tool with easy integration to toolsets for analytics, and has a remarkable ease of use. The accessibility and discoverability in RSA Archer is more difficult, as sections get densely nested. The search capability in Dynamics is smoother but reliant on complete words being used, whereas RSA Archer searching is full Boolean.

Incentivized

We selected Pentana because our neighbouring authorities are users and had spoken highly of the product and given us demonstrations; some of our staff were also familiar with Pentana when it was called Covalent. It seemed to be the best product on the market for monitoring risks, PIs and projects.

• We were able to achieve approx 63% gain in operational efficiency.
• Reduce the number of findings and exceptions during an Internal audit to almost zero.
• Get compliance to all client contracts tracked through the tool thus increasing the confidence of clients in our systems and processes.

Incentivized

• Pentana Risk has allowed my team to focus on other areas of work whereas before we would be manually chasing for updates on PIs and risk. Pentana Risk does the chasing for us!
• We are able to produce reports for audit purposes very easily, rather than sending spreadsheets which is what we used to do.
• New managers can easily inherit risks, projects and PIs and see all of this on a custom portal, saving them time when they start.