Well suited for general compliance, multiple initiatives, and integration with TeamMate. SAP GRC Process control may be better suited for an SAP environment. Oracle GRC may be better suited for an Oracle environment. Overall, BWise is a very cost effective, and flexible solution.
KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform is well suited for a company that knows what they're doing compliance wise and needs to save time doing it. It won't be something you can spend a few hours on and then put on autopilot. It was made to create a rhythm within your own team, and you'll need to have the buy-in. It's useful for IT and Legal teams that already have a vendor risk management process, but want to have a better handle on it. Giving an outside auditor read-only access to a scope is also a huge time saver.
Great reporting tool (uses SAP Business Objects). It is quite flexible on types of reports that can be created and supported. Also the reporting consultants are very competent and nice.
Highly customizable solution: almost everything can be tailored to an organization's needs, assessments, audits, issues, recommendations, tasks, etc. However, there's a trade-off between customization and the integration of different areas of the organization.
Increases visibility and efficiency in the organization. BWise offers centralized repositories (catalogs) that can be easily accessed and used by everyone in the organization (e.g. Process catalog, Policies and Procedures catalog, Risks, Controls, Laws catalogs, etc.). Also, the application allows findings on controls tested by Audit to be automatically reflected in controls monitored by SOX for example, without the need for SOX to retest them. So one area can leverage on the work of other areas increasing operational efficiency.
Increases integration and avoids silos. By choosing the correct design (e.g. Risk Workshops instead of Open Assessments), one area can see and benefit from another areas' work. An example was mentioned above; another would be Operational Risk area considering the results of Business Continuity, Vendor Management, Info Security, etc. assessments when carrying out theirs. Additionally, processes can be integrated: when contracting a new vendor for instance, one can include questions about data confidentiality and usage of models in the Vendor risk assessment. Answers to these could then trigger Info Sec / Model Risk assessments.
Increases accountability. Application provides full audit/change log with the type of change, name of executor, and date of change.
Easier follow-up. BWise sends automatic emails with reminders to the people required to take action on an issue, assessment, etc.
Vendor management has a few kinks to work out. We want to be able to do internal questionnaires for vendors as a compliance checklist before we sign off on a contract. Nothing in the works yet, but there are a few workarounds.
The navigation between different tasks in scope is clunky, and it's easy to lose your place, and it forces you back to the main page of the scope to retrace your steps.
Support from KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform is always great. It's always in-house localized support, with excellent response times, and dedicated Customer Success Managers to answer the bulk of your questions or take your suggestions and make them a feature request. They will also reach out at least quarterly and do health checks to make sure you're using the platform to the best of your ability.
Wasn't personally involved in the vendor selection process. I am aware that one of the main drivers for selecting BWise was cost (I believe BWise total project cost was several times lower than MetricStream's).
Quantivate and Fusion were the other two options we checked out. The quantity was high, and a good bit more expensive, but it was the best performing with its platform. They also had more modules that each cost extra to add to your subscription. KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform was all-in-one and a little less mature, but the better buy. Fusion was hard to follow in the demo, and I was not overly impressed. I may have made my decision early enough in the demo to not pay much more attention to it.
