Process Management 3 mins read

The digital future of compliance

Digitalizing risk and compliance processes can revolutionize your journey through a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.

Dr. Helge Hess Dr. Helge Hess

The digitalization of compliance processes can revolutionize making your way through an evolving regulatory landscape.

In many industries and regulated markets, compliance with regulatory requirements has become an indispensable “license to operate.”

However, many companies are confronted with a wide range of challenges to risk and compliance management

  • The number of regulations continues to grow
  • Companies struggle to maintain a systematic overview and keep up with regulatory changes
  • Compliance processes still need too much manual intervention, eating up time and leading to higher costs and more errors
  • Compliance and risk management are still often understood as isolated activities.

The contribution of digitalization

Digitalization and the use of new technologies can significantly reduce the manual effort and costs for compliance and increase the quality of the results.

Instead of manual handbooks, you can distribute policies and work instructions to employees in digital form, especially taking into account roles and responsibilities, so that everyone sees the instructions that are appropriate for them – whether they work on an oil rig or at the supermarket checkout.

Automated feedback and collaboration mechanisms allow employees to interact and share information with each other.

Process mining means the processing of each individual process instance is monitored and analyzed, to identify deviations from the defined target processing (i.e., compliance gaps).

Digital analysis can be performed in such a timely manner that non-compliant cases can be detected and prevented while still being executed.

AI- and ML-based chatbots and personal assistants can interact with customers and employees to avoid time-consuming manual processes, increasing productivity, providing real-time insights, generating reports, and automating compliance-related activities.

Preparing and executing audits (internal and external) is also often still a highly manual process. These activities can be made much more efficient through access to a company-wide compliance repository that describes both the relevant regulations and the implementation in the company, as well as providing access to the monitoring and process mining results.

In recent years, operational functions are often the first to see digital investment with compliance usually being the last.

However, the above examples show that the digital transformation of risk and compliance functions also promises enormous efficiency gains and competitive advantages.

You can watch the webinar with Forrester, 3 Pillars of Operational Excellence, by clicking below. And take a look at this post-webinar Q&A with Rob Koplowitz, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester.

Read this article in its entirety in OPEX.