Compliance & Risks
Getting Ahead of Regulations to Garner Competitive Advantage

“All companies, but especially those with global reach and aspirations, have been having a hard time keeping up with regulations,” says Damien McGovern, Founder and Director of Compliance & Risks. We work, he says with some of the best managed brands on the planet. Our clients understand that the trend to use tougher regulations is an important lever not just to make the world cleaner and safer, but now increasingly to avert catastrophic climate change. “There are good reasons to believe this trend will dramatically increase in the near future. It’s just not worth betting against,” says McGovern. So rather than fighting the inevitable our clients are determined to get out in front, putting as much daylight between themselves and proposed regulations coming down the tracks.

The leadership teams we work with see legal regulations as a subset of all requirements to be met, not just the legal ones but also the myriad of internal company policies that they self-impose to gain a competitive edge. In fact, says McGovern these latter are often the interesting ones.

A big question is what tools should companies use to support their processes around standards and regulations? One suggestion is to allow different teams with different responsibilities to figure it out for themselves. After all, why should the chemistry team have to use the same tools to track and manage regulations as the data protection, product take-back and recycling, or site-specific health and safety teams?

But counter to that are well established principles of business economics that favor finding as many ways for different teams to fit together well, rather than being separated and working in different silos. In fact, finding ways to get great fit has been identified as an area of competitive advantage that is difficult to copy, and so potentially longer lasting and more valuable.

The beauty of the C2P Requirements Management Platform used by our clients to manage all the external and internal requirements, says an animated McGovern, is that it has the inbuilt flexibility to follow the unique contours of a client’s processes and workflows.

This is a new world where a company is regarded as worthy of being sustained and consumers can find a match with companies they admire, in addition to loving their products

The human mind does not have silos; it has functional areas that are connected in ways that allow humans to think laterally and creatively. The C2P platform deliberately mirrors this, and is used by our clients to collaborate and problem-solve. And crucially, C2P deliberately provides space to build corporate memory accessible to future generations of decision makers.

“We’re encouraging our clients to create products that can think! Imagine that,” says McGovern. In the context of a Requirements Management Platform this would allow consumers to truly know what they are buying and from whom. Products would know about themselves in ways that are meaningful to consumers, and could allow real choice where buyer and seller values are aligned. This is a new world where a company is regarded as worthy of being sustained and consumers can find a match with companies they admire, in addition to loving their products.

“Our innovation lab is busy automating the way we acquire and structure our data and using machine learning to improve user experience,” informs McGovern. Finally, McGovern suggests, it’s as important to innovate around processes and the human worker, as on technologies.