Conformance is voluntary adherence to a standard, rule, specification, requirement, design, process or practice. Compliance is forced adherence to a law, regulation, rule, process or practice. Monitoring conformance and compliance to regulatory needs, requirements, standards or practices are a huge task where multiple units, multiple audit teams, multiple locations, multiple regulations, multiple standards and practices are involved. It is true in all scenarios like
- Regulatory authorities auditing units / establishments / properties / factories
- Customers auditing their suppliers and value chain
- Head offices auditing their branches or subsidiaries or agencies or outlets
Compliance is often overlooked by auditing units and is in most scenarios are driven by higher authorities like Regulatory agencies, Customers or Head offices. Unless driven by a strong system-based approach, these compliance management often not adhered to leading to serious untoward incidence causing losses.
With the robust system for conformance management in place, it is very easy to automate end to end audit process from planning, audit execution, NC recording and tracking of resolution of them. Using advanced analytics of specific non-conformity, you will be able to predict the conformance failure.
With the introduction of IoT devices, it would no longer be needed to conduct a physical audit on the site but the regulatory body or customer or head office will be able to pull the required information at will in real-time. This would provide an accurate and factual picture to those responsible for conformance monitoring. This would be much beneficial in the case of continuous process plants.
Similarly, by using video analytics, conformance management can be automated, for example, if security guard needs to take around on a specific route, then video camera recording can be analyzed using video analytics technology and any default by a security guard on their conformance of a round on a specified route can be easily identified.
With the deployment of OpExWorks framework for conformance and compliance management where hundreds or thousands of entities are to be monitored, the entire becomes very easy, automated and proactive.
Compliance management does not add any value to end customer directly and customer is not willing to pay for it, as compliance being the basic necessity. Conformance or Compliance failure in the value chain can have high impact and devastating outcomes for an organization resulting in loss of reputation and may also result in financial losses, property losses and even losses of life in some cases.
Some of the few example of high impact compliance requirements are
- Manufacturing value chain in complex engineering products like automotive
- Food products supply chain, manufacturing, storage and distribution network
- Petroleum products manufacturing, transportation, storage and distribution
- Fire hazards in places like high rise building, malls, multiplexes, factories, schools, hotels and restaurants which is managed by local self governments
- Environment, Health and Safety in manufacturing industries
- Financial institutions like insurance, banking, NBFC etc.
- Education institutions
About OpExWorks Solutions
OpExWorks Solutions Pvt. Ltd. is a software solutions company providing information technology support to private and public sector companies for conformance and compliance management. It also provides hand holding support through implementation of IT systems for achieving operational excellence in supply chain for performance improvement.
