In order for any organisation to meet its goals, it has to seriously concentrate on three things: Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance, known collectively as GRC. These three areas have quite a bit of overlap, which is why they are often treated as three parts of a single area.
Governance is essentially the sum of the processes established to guide the direction of the company. Risk Management clears the way for good governance by predicting and preventing anything that might get in the way of achieving good governance, and Compliance is the regular and ongoing effort to make sure everything and everyone keeps working the way that they’re meant to in order to reach and maintain good governance.
Always on Patrol
Compliance can be compared to a police force. Police Officers patrol regularly for two reasons. First, they hope to prevent anything bad from happening. If police presence is common knowledge, crimes are stopped before they start. Second, they act to arrest any unacceptable activity and deal with it appropriately. Compliance has the exact same purpose – ensuring that the laws (the rules and processes) are being followed.
When GRC processes are successfully followed, business success is one step closer. Without compliance measures, including powerful compliance software, setting governance goals is a futile exercise. Imagine what your town would be like if the police force didn’t exist. Chaos. Needless to say, the town wouldn’t run as it was intended, no matter how many laws or regulations were written down. If there’s nothing to check that they’re being followed, no one will follow them.
Exporting Complexities
As much as compliance software is necessary for any business, for exporters it’s even more important. Exporters have many added layers of complexity when it comes to compliance. Domestic production laws, exporting laws, international shipping laws, and finally customs and the domestic laws of the destination country. The amount of and difference in the laws and regulations of the various national and international bodies is a lot to understand, let alone comply with.
Further, the need for real time audit reporting is greater with exports. Discovering an irregularity a full week after it was first found and recorded could mean large amounts of lost revenue or fees and fines. Being able to handle issues as they arise is vital when the product might be on the other side of the globe within days or hours. Compliance software such as Compliance Checkpoint, with robust, real time auditing, solves this problem for exporters which in turn contributes to good governance and better GRC overall.
Compliance Checkpoint is compliance software that provides a scalable, end-to-end auditing solution with real time results for immediate analysis. For exporters, this means knowing what’s happening at every step from production to delivery, and greatly lowering the risk of bad governance because of non-compliance. Add up the possible fines aggregated from Australia, China, and the WTO for a single incident, then consider whether that money could have been better spent preventing it from happening.
