Risk analysis & modelling

Company or Client – Team Homes
Trading activity – Property developer and principal contractor

What?

Carried out monthly risk analysis on all construction project.

How?

  • Maintained an Excel based risk register recording description, kick-in stage, impact on critical path, impact on other risk, triggering factors, probability and actual impact.
  • Used Excel Monte Carlo simulation to report impact using available mean and sigma data over 10,000 iteration.
  • Quantified contingency required in various scenarios to counter potential risks to the board.

Company or Client – Team Homes
Trading activity – Property developer and principal contractor

What?

Used Excel modelling techniques to carry out construction cost forecasting.

How?

  • Used S curve function to carry out initial forecast.
  • Upload sub contractors forecast with a single click.
  • Request explanations for all variances and audit explanations given.

Company or Client – Combined Advanced Thermal Solutions
Trading activity – Advanced Pyrolysis Technology

What?

Designed a model to carry out single or multi plant appraisal.

How?

  • Collected data about waste types, gate fee, landfill, recyclates, refuse derived fuel (RDF), RDF to SynGas ratio, SynGas to heat and electricity ratio  and prepared a data matrix.
  • Prepared ovex, opex and capex matrix.
  • Collected plant construction data and prepared a cost, duration and cash profile matrix.
  • Enabled users to simply forecast the number of plant going live in a period to calculate the financial appraisal (monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or annually) with income statement, balance sheet and cashflow.
  • Carried out break even analysis via Excel goal seek function.
  • Summarised scenarios with multiple variables from the data matrix using Excel What If data table function.

Company or Client – Lafornaia
Trading activity – Bread manufacturer

What?

Designed a model to assist optimal production planning.

(Also provided similar advice to other clients)

How?

  • Collected data about historic sales, contribution, man hour and machine time by each product line.
  • Used Excel Solver add-in  to set up a simple model to assist decision-making.

Company or Client – First London biomass
Trading activity – Wood pellet manufacturer

What?

Designed a model to carry out single or multi plant appraisal.

How?

  • Collected data about waste wood, virgin wood, direct labour, pellet price, RHI etc and prepared a data matrix.
  • Prepared ovex, opex and capex matrix.
  • Collected plant construction data and prepared a cost, duration and cash profile matrix.
  • Enabled users to simply forecast the number of plant going live in a period to calculate the financial appraisal (monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or annually) with income statement, balance sheet and cashflow.
  • Carried out break even analysis via Excel goal seek function.
  • Summarised scenarios with multiple variables (sales price, virgin wood cost, pellet mill and briquette mill combination) from the data matrix using Excel What If data table function.

Company or Client – Team Homes Precast
Trading activity – Manufacturing of precast concrete panels

What?

Designed a model to plan and complete casting schedule.

How?

  • Link model to live site planned call-off schedule.
  • Prepared mould capacity matrix e.g. how many of what type of panel can the mould produce in a day.
  • Prepared gantry crane capacity matrix.
  • Prepared site stock holding capacity matrix.
  • Written VBA code using a do loop and solver to optimise plant usage after taking into account the mould capacity, crane hours, site capacity and panel delivery.

During his long auditing career Mostafa has always adopted a risk based audit approach and designed unique risk models based on client business history, financial ratios, industry comparison, management performance and internal control compliance etc to identify high risk areas where additional audit resources were deployed to carry out non CAAT audit procedures.

Mostafa has also advised many clients on their credit control risk assessment techniques and developed Excel based models and reports to record, manage and monitor such risk. This work included importing credit agency (Fame, Experian) data, live linking debtors ledger and trading history including past defaults and withheld counts, live linking sales account managers report, analysing and summarising key risk areas for board reporting.

The above short case studies are only a small sample of Mostafa’s risk analysis and modelling work. His expertise in this field is far-reaching and he is learning new skills all the time.