Suppliers are crucial for regulatory compliance, but collecting their documents is challenging due to geography, language, time zone, and understanding of compliance requirements.
A good Supplier Engagement system is essential for a compliance program and ensures you increase coverage of suppliers and maximize submissions of required documents by suppliers. As documentation requirements vary for different regulations like RoHS, REACH, Prop 65, Conflict Minerals, IMDS, etc., it is also important to ensure that suppliers understand what is being expected from them.
ComplianceXL enhances your compliance program with a comprehensive supplier engagement solution, encompassing documentation requirements, supplier training, and direct communication for soliciting necessary documents. This approach includes personalized follow-ups to ensure high response rates, streamlining your compliance efforts.
What are the Supplier’s challenges?
Many organizations assume that suppliers have ready-made data such as Full Material Disclosures, Certificate of Compliance, or any other compliance documents but very often, that is not the case, as several suppliers may not have dealt with compliance ever in the past. We have seen that many suppliers struggle with issues such as:
- Insufficient knowledge of compliance requirements and obligations
- Lack of understanding of what is expected of a client.
- Inadequate resources or expertise to create compliance documentation.
- Absence of a unified platform to provide the necessary data on-demand.+
Ways to Engage your Suppliers
- Educate suppliers on the global compliance scenario: Most suppliers are unaware of the regulations they are being asked to comply with, their requirements, procedures, and deadlines. Our training programs are designed to ensure compliance know-how is shared with suppliers, thereby enabling compliance.
- Active engagement: The supplier engagement team at ComplianceXL takes a proactive approach, by contacting suppliers via email and telephone, to explain what is required, answer questions they may have and make sure they submit what is required. A collaborative approach in this engagement phase is greatly helpful in maximizing results.
- Multi-lingual, Multi-time zone: With a global supply base, it is important to ensure that you can engage with suppliers in other countries during their business hours, and if required in their local language. This goes a long way in ensuring a complete response.