Qudos System 3 Guided Tour - compliance and risk management

Addressing a multitude of compliance issues

Modern organisations face demands to maintain and demonstrate compliance to an ever-increasing range of standards and legal / regulatory requirements on a variety of issues. These include:

Quality
Customers expect that the goods and services supplied to them will meet their quality expectations. Many seek assurance from their suppliers in the form of a quality management systems based on the current international standard ISO 9001:2000. This is the most widely used standard of any kind in the world, and certification to it is often a factor in tender adjudication.

Occupational Health & Safety
The health and safety of employees and others tends to be subject to national legislation or local regulation - as well as standards such as AS/NZS 4801:2001 in Australasia, and OHSAS 18001 in various countries.

Environment
Environmental issues are never far from the news headlines these days, and both buyers and regulatory bodies are increasingly looking to see organisations manage their environmental impacts with systems based on the international standard ISO 14001:2004.

Food Safety
Several high profile cases have illustrated the importance of rigorous systems to maintain food safety, and the price of failure. The new ISO 22000 standard combines requirements for HACCP analysis, good manufacturing practice and management systems similar to the other ISO management standards. It can be applied to many organisations in the food chain - from farms, through processing, transport, packaging, retail, and others.

Information security
As we become more dependent on information technology, so issues relating to the security of information seem to be taking an ever-higher profile. The international standard ISO/IEC 17799:2000 provides a common basis for developing organisational security standards and effective security management practice. This topic is also subject to a range of laws and regulations governing privacy, confidentiality and other related issues.

FOI (Freedom of Information)
FOI is governed by legislation in a number of countries - with requirements for public-sector and other organisations to respond to reasonable requests for information that they hold.

The above are just a few typical examples of the compliance issues faced. Depending on your industry and location there will be plenty more. There is one thing for sure, and that is compliance requirements are not going away any time soon. In society, we as consumers, employees, voters have increasing expectations. Legislators, regulators and standards bodies respond, and organisations have little choice but to comply. Non-compliance can pose a grave risk to an organisation's wellbeing, but maintaining compliance can be an onerous task. Efficient and effective systems are definitely required.

Risk management

Compliance and risk management go hand-in-hand. Risk is a fact of life, for without risk, nothing ever gets done. Although we cannot completely avoid it, we can certainly manage it, and there is increasing expectation by shareholders, customers, employees, and the community that we will do so. We can consider risks as part of our decision-making processes - replacing ignorance and uncertainty with considered assessment, plans and controls.

The effective management of compliance and risk is absolutely critical to the survival and success of public and private-sector organisations alike.

The penalties of noncompliance or ignoring risks can be severe, including: accidents and incidents, lost opportunities, business disruption, bad public relations, heavy fines and even imprisonment. The greatest risk of all is to take no action - to hope it won't happen to you. Smart organisations everywhere are now putting appropriate management systems in place, and Qudos offers the framework for those systems.

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