Managing Compliance, Responsibility, and Sustainability refers to the ability of a company and an organization to manage key business and key organization processes. An organization acts responsibly when it operates in accordance with the laws and regulations of its home country and the countries where its business is located.
The laws of one’s own country are often well known. Most of the challenges are in following the laws of other countries and the changes of law. Compliance must be shown and proven frequently in public affairs, especially in regulated industries. A good compliance solution supports the organization in real time and enables compliance verification anytime.
Challenges to compliance management often lie in the good control of key organizational processes, such as procurement or logistics. Typically, different people use different systems at different stages of the process, which are not always integrated or communicate to each other. For example, the sourcing process typically begins with the organization’s strategy for establishing criteria for suppliers. Needless to say, if an organization has its own code of conduct, the supplier is also required to do the same.
When deciding and concluding an agreement with the vendor, the obligations of the agreement must also be able to be followed. Later in the business, it must be possible to evaluate how supply and material compliance will materialize. To enable this vendor estimation, keeping the business informed at all stages of the procurement process requires the information system to be compatible between different sources of information and to access the right information for real people in real time.
For compliance, it is important that relevant information is available in real time. If any deviation from one’s own activities is detected or something fatal occurs, the need for information management becomes even more pronounced. Today’s requirement is a quick response to what happened and a self-report of what happened. This is achieved by having a system for managing responsibility that supports the company’s processes and the entire organization being able to monitor how key processes work against compliance goals.
Risk management is typically perceived as mainly affecting the financial management area. However, the risks of all business processes need to be able to be identified and secured early enough to be managed before they can escalate. Good risk management is based on the fact that risks can be seen and observed as part of the business process. Thus, risk management becomes an active and integral part of key process management.
A good compliance solution considers an organization’s business and measures its performance on a daily basis. It also provides management with information on the functionality of processes, including compliance, as part of strategic business monitoring. Planning for the future is easier when traditional management review meetings can be conducted with real-time information without having to look at the state of the company’s key processes through 3-6 months of actual reports.