Regardless of the area you’re in, if you have a mission critical operation, you’re bound by compliance requirements that you must fulfill. How can you assure that you meet those compliance requirements now and that you’ll be able to continue to meet them as your landscape changes?
As the world evolves into more fluid operational landscapes in order to assure better end customer experience and far more streamlined operations, so compliance requirements increase. May it be to assure better quality, higher safety or to control an ever increasingly connected value chain, compliance requirements are mounting and they’re coming in from multiple sides, all at once.
The big question is: How are you going to tackle these compliance requirements and still improve your bottom line? To comply means to exert more control and control comes at a cost, sometimes a very steep one. And the bad news keep on coming, as failing to comply on a very competitive market means, at the very least, a significant degradation of your ability to keep the business with a customer and, on extreme cases, to be out of business altogether.
To comply means two different things: That you perform in such a way that specific requirements are met and that you demonstrate that you are actually meeting those requirements. It’s this dual execution plus accountability that gets you into trouble, because you can execute but if you don’t trace what you’re executing in such a way that you can prove you’re doing the right thing in the right timeframe, it’s like you’re not doing it at all.
This means that you need to focus on both efficiency, in order to execute according to requirements without compromising the cost structure, and on traceability, so you can be audited and present trustworthy data that support your compliance statements.
So, what’s the formula to bridge this mounting gap in highly operational organizations? Well, you need to put in place three things:
- A clear process-oriented, task-driven landscape where the fundamental issue is to minimize error opportunities and redundant activities. While designing the process, focus on the operation, what makes sense and what drives you in the right direction. Do not let technology constraints step in and derail you from doing the right thing nor be afraid of the change. Change is risky but manageable. Failing to comply or putting your cost base over the limit just blows you out of the water;
- An integration-oriented, automation-driven, operation-aware technology platform that maps your operational landscape and is able to interact with every single stakeholder in your processes in real time, may them be systemic or human. You need to get information on to the floor and process information from the real world as it happens, so you can improve your execution ability dynamically, while you’re tracing every single event every single moment. This is assured traceability with unsurpassable reliability;
- A consistent people engagement strategy, leading them to drive compliance as the result of a continuous process improvement strategy where they are the most important piece. As people take responsibility and perceive their contributions are taken into consideration while mapping the process and making it work on the support platform, they become compliance agents that defend the organization from disruption and strive to excel.
These are the pillars that not only allow you to improve your bottom line as compliance requirements mount as it is also the strategy that assures that your compliance risks while changing are tackled.
At Processware, we’re extremely conscious about delivering a consistent framework to handle compliance requirements while pursuing transformational efficiency. And we’ve succeeded at making this happen at some of the most stringently compliant business in the world. You can read about some of these cases here.
