Regulatory Process Best Practices

SGS FoodNexus’s mission is to utilize technology to transform huge volumes of compliance information into user-friendly, actionable knowledge to help you make faster and more informed decisions. Working towards this, the SGS FoodNexus product team spends a substantial amount of time speaking with current and potential users to learn about how they work. What we have gathered through all of these conversations is that the perfect regulatory process does not exist. This is something we all know. However, there are best practices we have seen emerge from some of the more successful organizations. It is worth highlighting a couple of these (we plan to break it down further in a future White Paper as well).

The day-to-day objectives of members within Regulatory, Compliance and Safety teams are challenging, time-consuming and mission critical. These objectives are diverse, ranging from the detailed interpretation of legal requirements to participating in an international committee’s working group on a particular topic. There are many others on too that add to the complexity of managing all of the various tasks at hand. What therefore can be done to not only simplify your work but also make it more strategically relevant for the broader organization? Let’s start with two approaches worth considering:

1) Adopt an Early Warning Approach: This means monitoring not only the regulations in effect, but also news, media and social media, as well as the large e-commerce platforms to detect early warnings before they become major incidents or crises.
2) Take a Customer-Centric Approach to Compliance: understand your customer, what’s important to them and where they buy. Or, learn about your products and how they respond when something may not be right. Build systems and processes based on this assessment allowing compliance to become an integral part of a customer-oriented business.

Be on the lookout as we expand further on this interesting topic.