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Solving Common Challenges for Supply Chain Compliance

January 22, 2021

Compliance is getting harder.

A rising tide of regulations, increased consumer awareness, the persistence of outdated manual compliance management processes, and the frequency of large-scale disruptions continue to add to the burden of compliance operations. Unfolding political situations result in consequential changes the industry must act quickly to abide by. Organizations with supply chains spread across the globe struggle to make sense of non-standardized data arriving in various formats and levels of integrity.

Your organization likely experiences the pains of such compliance challenges on many levels. Across the departments of your business, your compliance, supply chain, procurement, and sustainability managers and higher-level executives are forced to spend increasing resources putting out fires. Simply reaching maintenance mode is becoming a struggle.

Below, we look at how manual processes and disaggregated data are behind much of the trouble, and how digitization addresses these pain points in the following ways:

  • Increases efficiency within the team
  • Promotes cross-team collaboration
  • Stops ineffective wasting of resources on compliance
  • Puts a cost to compliance programs
  • Quantifies processes
  • Centralizes compliance monitoring, reporting, and evaluation
  • Standardizes processes and information so you can compare data

With compliance and sustainability an ever-growing concern in business, robust compliance programs build transparency — which in turn builds trust and loyalty among consumers and other stakeholders alike. Your brand’s reputation is protected. Investors and shareholders put more faith and value in you. Both employee retention and morale improve. In the end, you become a more resilient organization and build a proactive approach to compliance, basing your decisions on high quality data from your supply chain.

Let’s now look at how your company’s different departments and managerial roles at different levels bear the burden of compliance challenges. We will also discuss potential technology solutions to compliance challenges, including the benefits that that Inspectorio Rise can bring to your organization.

Compliance department

The challenges your compliance department faces affect its ability to perform effective risk management. The following are pains and solutions on both the executive and managerial levels:

Pains and Solutions for Compliance Executives and Directors

Pains

Disaggregated information:

Receiving variably formatted, inconsistent data hinders sharing and creates a lack of visibility and control over supplier and factory risk.

Technology Solutions

Full visibility:

Compliance management software provides full visibility over what is happening and how to mitigate risk accordingly, leading to smart — rather than blind — resource allocation.

Jumbled spreadsheets:

Excel sheets tend to get passed around to multiple contributors, which makes them messy, confusing, and plagued by human error.

Consistent data entry:

All data entry occurs in a centralized platform for end-to-end compatibility.

No meaningful insights:

Without centralized and standardized data, comparison and analytics are challenging — you cannot compare factories, suppliers, regions, standards, etc. with foggy data and an inability to extract meaningful insights, crafting an effective, quantifiable compliance and risk mitigation strategy is difficult.

Centralized data:

You can monitor all audits in real-time from your dashboard, with interactive CAPAs allowing clear collaboration with other teams. All data is stored and continuously incorporated into autonomous analytics, letting you keep track of metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks. In other words, you know whether you are achieving your compliance milestones or, on the contrary, need to rethink your strategy.

Inconsistent compliance standards:

Reporting is not standardized for compliance, further hindering the ability to analyze data, make meaningful comparisons and reduce risk.

Standards at scale:

Easily creating and rolling out standards at scale helps you configure assessments to capture interesting data, such as tracking specific KPIs.

Pains and Solutions for Compliance Managers

Pains

Non-standardized audits:

When each facility conducts audits in different ways, the inconsistency makes it difficult to understand vendor/factory performance.

Technology Solutions

End-to-end standardization:

Inspectorio Rise lets you standardize your compliance program, centralize compliance requirements, and adapt to a changing world to keep track of your supply chain regardless of changing global dynamics.

Increasing regulations:

It’s increasingly hard to keep track of all external and internal compliance requirements.

Instant standard rollout:

Roll out new standards, criteria checklists, best practices, and pre-assessments at scale, helping facilities prepare for factory inspection, government audits, and new regulations.

Manual processes:

Manual report writing and audit fatigue decrease productivity and waste resources on low-value-added activities.

Streamlined reporting and CAPAs:

Inspectorio Rise lets you access and customize standards and questionnaires, enable robust yet streamlined audits performed on mobile devices, and automate reports and CAPAs.

Supply Chain department

Your supply chain department deals with every aspect of production and transport, presenting them with significant compliance challenges in the current climate. The following are pains and solutions for supply chain executives and managers:

Pains and Solutions for Supply Chain Executives and Directors

Pains

Lack of visibility:

You cannot understand the state of your supply chain’s compliance without visibility, nor can you create data-driven strategies to address problems. This is because your supply chain is composed of many tiers, which makes it intertwined and complex.

Technology Solutions

Full visibility:

Inspectorio Rise provides complete, real-time visibility over all compliance initiatives at every facility in your supply chain.

Identifying underperformers too late:

Without access to performance data, you can’t know whether a factory is underperforming in time to proactively intervene. Without easily available compliance data, it is challenging to identify issues in real-time and address them in a timely manner.

Performance comparison:

By comparing the performance of suppliers/factories, you can continuously optimize your compliance efforts and supply chain operations. You can also set clear KPIs and benchmarks and monitor them to reach milestones.

Uncertainty around new facilities:

You lack standardized assessment and data when scouting out new suppliers or factories, making it hard to know whether they’ll meet your standards.

Real-time supplier evaluation:

As a network platform with shared statistics, Inspectorio Rise gives you up-to-date factory performance to help you decide whether to contract with a new facility.

Pains and Solutions for Supply Chain Managers

Pains

Tracking internal compliance:

Using manual processes, it is extremely difficult to know whether factories are equipped to comply with safety, social, environmental, and other regulations.

Technology Solutions

Real-time visibility:

Inspectorio’s supply chain data management provides an intuitive GUI to instantly track progress and compliance across your entire supply chain ecosystem, helping you ensure everyone abides by the highest standards possible.

No defined standards:

Objectively assessing the capabilities of new vendors or factories is next to impossible without clear and consistent standards for comparison.

Consistent comparative metrics:

High-integrity data from every client on the platform provides clear metrics that make comparing factories to one another easy.

Procurement department

Procurement challenges during COVID-19 tie in with many global sourcing challenges — overcoming barriers to sustainable procurement, ensuring factory compliance, and more. The following are some common issues and solutions:

Pains and Solutions for Procurement Executives and Directors

Pains

Low visibility:

With disaggregated data and poor visibility over suppliers/factories located on the other side of the globe, it’s challenging to develop effective strategies to deal with malpractice, performance issues, and non-compliance.

Technology Solutions

Gain visibility:

Inspectorio Rise keeps everything in real-time, letting you conduct assessments, make data-driven decisions based on analytics, and finally create strategies to mitigate risk.

Responsible sourcing:

Work towards responsible and sustainable procurement by identifying issues with unauthorized outsourcing.

Pains and Solutions for Procurement Managers

Pains

Production planning:

With unauthorized outsourcing a real problem, procurement managers often can’t be sure whether a factory outsourced in order to meet an expected delivery.

Technology Solutions

Monitor mapped-out supply chains:

With Inspectorio Rise, you can assess the capabilities of suppliers/factories to identify anomalous trends, helping you stop issues before they arise.

Sustainability department

By bringing value to a company, its ecosystem, and its associated communities, sustainability departments also make the company more profitable and ethically sound. Here are some of the challenges in promoting compliance:

Pains and Solutions for Sustainability Executives and Directors

Pains

Increased demands:

Laws and regulations continue to add new pressure to track the origins and materials of your products, a task that is immensely burdensome without technology solutions. While there are strong examples of brands that know where their products come from — Patagonia is a well-known one — most brands and retailers do not, which puts them at risk.

Technology Solutions

A shift in culture:

By allowing you to roll out and track digitized standards, Inspectorio Rise helps your supply chain transition from a culture of efficiency-at-all-costs to one of sustainability and transparency. Organizations across the supply chain will no longer assume they can get away with unsustainable production.

Increased scandals:

With the ubiquity of social media and brighter spotlights on brands, it is only a matter of time before a slip-up is caught and the public knows about it. The problem is that you can’t protect against issues if you don’t know about them.

Real-time reporting on all issues:

Receive information on issues quickly and act immediately to rectify them for more efficient risk mitigation.

Pains and Solutions for Sustainability Managers

Pains

Inability to roll out standards:

Without the ability to roll out sustainability standards at scale, you cannot implement or track sustainability programs and cannot report effectively to executives. As regulations continue to pile up, this amounts to ever-increasing risk.

Technology Solutions

New standard rollout at scale:

Digital transformation through Inspectorio creates the framework necessary to introduce and monitor new standards, as well as enjoy new levels of transparency and traceability.

Inefficient communication:

Global supply chains pose inherent challenges to communication between suppliers, factories, executives, and more.

Centralized communication:

By placing all data in one place, Inspectorio Rise simplifies communication, automated reports, collaborations, CAPAs, and more.

Decrease regulatory burden with Inspectorio Rise

Regulations add headaches, but they are not going away. To decrease the burden of compliance regulations while improving your supply chain’s ability to meet them, choose Inspectorio Rise. Our network platform helps you push your company toward greater environmental sustainability, consumer trust, and profitability by providing complete visibility and transparency over your production network.

Inspectorio Rise allows you to trace, communicate, remedy, and strategize with an ease and clarity that were previously not possible. Contact us to learn more about how we can resolve the pains of different roles in your company.

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