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REGULATORY COMPLIANCE


AUTOMATINGREGULATORY PROCESSES


Matt Eustace, head of Solutions Engineering at Aiimi, explains how insight engines can make compliance faster and more accurate


M


anaging compliance for manufacturing and utilities organisations is a huge challenge.


With numerous regulations to follow, often differing for each region, regulatory processes consume valuable hours. By leveraging insight engines to automate their regulation processes, organisations can make compliance faster and more accurate. Manufacturing and utilities organisations


operate in heavily regulated industries. Juggling health and safety regulations, CE marking, or water pollution standards for industrial businesses demands the ability to process and manage large data sets, with each regulation requiring different documentation to prove compliance. The main difficulty here is that much of the data required to prove compliance, or non- compliance, is locked in unstructured or semi-structured data sources. In manufacturing and utilities, this is especially challenging as regulations relating to large- scale and mission-critical assets are often dependent on the data contained in manuals and handbooks detailing thousands of parts. With all this data in an undiscoverable state, truly automating regulatory processes is not possible. It is best practice for organisations to


translate regulatory frameworks into sets of business rules that become the foundation for governance, i.e. how documents and data are processed and stored; for example, maintaining asset repair records or implementing access controls for sensitive data. But in reality, these processes are not always adhered to, and it is only during audits that organisations discover that governance processes have not been followed – by which time it may be too late. When information is not immediately


available, compiling compliance reports is a time-consuming, manual process. Further to this, without intelligent automation around data discovery, human error also exposes organisations to more compliance risks. It’s here that insight engines can deliver savings by locating the exact information needed,


precisely when it’s needed, quickly and accurately. After an insight engine has indexed all


information from unstructured documents, making it searchable and discoverable, this data can then be enriched across the organisation. Here, insight engines can begin to mitigate compliance risks, quickly identifying compliant data, and that which may present a risk. For data that is highlighting a compliance risk, further enrichment steps can be implemented through named entity recognition to pinpoint terms and phrases in unstructured assets, then label and classify them so they can then be made compliant.


Identifying relevant information For example, an organisation operating in a highly regulated field, such as defence manufacturing, and looking to divest a team to another organisation, might be dealing with data that is subject to export controls. An export control license defines what information can be divulged outside the organisation. Manually identifying what is and what is not subject to these controls requires a team of compliance and subject matter experts to go through the data sets, which might take more than half an hour per document. Insight engines can help quickly identify the information that is subject to the export control and that which is not, reducing the review process to a matter of minutes. Another benefit of automated regulatory


processes is the ability to easily amend or create new business rules when regulations have changed or new ones need to be implemented. In industrial organisations, the regulatory landscape is constantly evolving. For example, manufacturers selling their products into the UK post-Brexit must ensure UKCA markings are on their products – so having the tools to quickly identify those that are not yet compliant is essential.


In a similar way, The Department for


Business, Engineering and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is employing an insight engine to break down the complicated regulatory frameworks that manufacturers must adhere to. By making the regulations more manageable, BEIS is helping manufacturers outside the UK to understand the frameworks and encourage them to sell within the UK. Organisations can also leverage insight


engines when the importance of regulations becomes heightened, such as laws around dealing with sanctioned individuals due to the current conflict in Ukraine. US laws have strict liability principles with regard to dealing with sanctioned individuals, and manufacturers with sanctioned individuals in their supply chain could be seen as violating the law, despite intent. Insight engines can quickly scan through contracts with suppliers and procurement documents to assess involvement with sanctioned or embargoed individuals, and even determine a degree of separation. Creating automated regulatory processes


is dependent on having discoverable data available. Insight engines uncover data previously hidden in unstructured sources to create a more comprehensive data landscape. With a richer set of information, organisations can produce accurate regulation reports, at pace and scale. In manufacturing and utilities where


regulation is mission critical, keeping up with ever-changing rules is challenging but essential. With regulators increasingly employing insight engines to streamline regulatory processes and to improve their capabilities around identifying non- compliance, advanced automation capabilities for the regulated is key for staying ahead.


Aiimi www.aiimi.com


MAY 2022 | PROCESS & CONTROL 51


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