One way in which Laurent Barbagli has helped promote risk awareness and risk management within Lafarge S.A. has been to expand the scope of risk audits undertaken in the company's various departments and geographies.

This approach also has seen changes to the way Lafarge audits the performance of external partners such as brokers.

Mr. Barbagli, Lafarge's group risk and insurance manager, has enlarged the scope of risk audits undertaken throughout the organization for fire risks to now include natural hazards, machinery breakdown and quarry and landslide risk.

The results of these audits produce risk consulting reports outlining scenarios, vulnerabilities and recommendations.

In the past four years, about 2,100 such reports have been issued.

And during 2014-2015, all of the company's cement plants were audited.

This auditing process, along with the risk reporting database tool developed by Mr. Barbagli and his team, prompted several risk management projects.

For example, on-site risk assessments for earthquake risk were organized because of limitations to traditional modeling.

They assessed peak ground acceleration and the solidity of soil, among other things, and tailor-made recommendations for sites were then produced.

Mr. Barbagli and his team were also able to structure projects to implement groupwide standards for risk mitigation.

For example, in the area of fire protection, an internal audit revealed a siloed approach to risk. So Mr. Barbagli and his team, saw a need to align all stakeholders — the group executive committee, group engineers, external risk consultants, and the group finance department — to work on a project for new standards for dealing with fire risk.

The team also has begun a project to implement group standards for risk mitigation for machinery breakdown, with the company's industrial performance department as a sponsor.

These efforts formed part of Mr. Barbagli's drive to create a risk community within Lafarge and have helped to create synergies across risk functions in the company.

For example, engineering committees have participated in workshops on plant construction to address earthquake risk mitigation, among other things.

And the methodology used in audits also has been used to help develop a robust risk management intelligence database.

Mr. Barbagli also has taken an appraisal approach to monitoring the performance of its brokers and captive manager, all of whom Mr. Barbagli declined to name.

At quarterly meetings, Mr. Barbagli, a broker and an external consultant meet to rate the broker's performance against about 40 key performance indicators.

This has led to better dialogue between Mr. Barbagli and the broker, he said, and the broker's fees are linked to performance against this scorecard.