Weekly Brief

7 Steps for Regulatory Compliance Steering APAC Utilities

Utilities Tech Outlook | Friday, September 06, 2019

The regulatory requirement is no new phenomenon, and non- compliance is daunting utility providers. What utilities need at this juncture is a compliance strategy that can effectively achieve compliance.  

FREMONT, CA: Digital disruption is dominating the utility sector demanding risk, legal and compliance leaders to drive an ideal strategy to enable firms to work in new ways, which is no easy task. The regulatory environment across Asia Pacific regions are also becoming increasingly onerous. Navigating through this increasingly complex regulatory requirements is challenging for energy, oil, gas, and other utility companies in the area. To effectively manage risk and stay compliant, firms must establish proactive policies and have a strategic approach to their business.

To tackle these challenge utility providers in APAC region are bringing together the expertise of senior-level risk, legal and compliance professionals and regulatory bodies across the region to explore latest regulatory and compliance trends impacting the industry in APAC. Here is more on those utility compliance management trends and innovations prevalent in the APAC region. Every utility follows a framework that is specific to their internal operating environment. A predefined process of effectively achieving compliance practiced by utility services in the APAC region is to address planning, readiness assessment, remediation, and monitoring.

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• Readiness Assessment

Readiness Assessment is an effective way to profile the current state of utilities' processes concerning regulations and standards. Readiness assessment offers a simple way to checkpoint maturity and helps understand the core strength of the compliance management process. It also identifies processes, documents, and records that are missing or incomplete,  making it easier for utilities to estimate the work required to update compliance requirements. Each area that needs special attention will then be prioritized based on the Implementation plan.

• Trend Analysis

Trend analysis is one of the most important ways to manage risk. Insights on past incidents and claims are particularly valuable as they can predict future demands. Trend analysis can identify problem areas and illuminate their route cause allowing risk and compliance managers to take corrective actions, mitigate future occurrences, and address the source. By recognizing specific problems, compliance managers can work with the employees to strategize a solution and reduce the severity of the risk. Utilities are relying on software programs, mobile applications to quickly access the data and highlight areas.

• Monitoring

Ongoing monitoring is a tactic used by utilities to keep track of compliance status, process ownership, and assessment plans. For complete visibility into the compliance process and highlight risks, monitoring is essential. The core of surveillance is to create a sustainable structure giving way to consistent reporting and documentation. Monitoring helps compliance managers in the energy industry to keep track of both condition and performance monitoring, thereby freeing on-site resources for other critical activities. It helps energy plants avoid unplanned losses of capacity, enhance asset health, and attain stability.

• Reporting

Utilities are often building reports on claims and incident costs, mitigation strategies, and the impact and performance of the compliance management program. An effective reporting system allows automated generation and sharing of information. This avoids risk managers overloaded with manual tasks and paperwork. With better reports, utilities will be able to make more effective decisions to prioritize risks and compliance issues leading to benefits in time savings, cost savings, and reduced incident frequency.

• Crisis Plans

No utility provider is excluded from being the subject of intense scrutiny from its stakeholders, customers, and society in general. This is even more crucial in times of crisis, and reputation becomes very much at stake. To tackle this situation, APAC utility firms are coming up with crisis and reputation management plans. Their risk and compliance are continuously monitoring potential crisis factors and recognizing situations. Formalizing and practicing the crisis response is making forms ready for any event. The additional factors these companies consider are having a crisis team, quick recovery, and learning from an incident.

• Safety Culture

Safety culture is found to be a vital consideration for all utilities in the APAC region. It involves the general mindset of the employees about compliance and how to prevent risks through reporting unsafe actions, abnormal behavior, and taking proper precautions. The trend shows that creating the safety culture has the most significant among APAC utility providers, and it is increasingly reducing the number of compliance issues happening. Providers of the region are stressing on the emphasize of each employee, formalizing and communicating the culture, and building an effective reporting process to develop a safety culture inside the organization.

• Staying Updated

Regulations are constantly changing in the industry with environmental impact and customer relations being some critical concerns of utilities in the APAC region. To manage this risk, managers are regularly researching making changes proactively rather than reactively. Firms are striving to do better than the minimum level of compliance to create competitive advantage.

Amidst a highly regulated environment, where compliance management is a top priority, utility organizations are under increased scrutiny. Regulatory compliance is not a onetime exercise but is a never-ending process which involves complex regulatory requirements. Experts indicate that utility risk management and compliance initiatives will get more complicated in the coming years. The lack of adequate risk and compliance management frameworks and strategies can lead to undesirable consequences and hefty penalties from the regulators. It can impact all business functions operationally and strategically. With the help of a compliance roadmap and framework, utility providers can achieve their critical business objectives and keep pace with the complex regulatory landscape.

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