- February 14, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Manufacturing, Safety
It’s critical that your manufacturing operation stays compliant with all laws and regulations, both domestic and international. It not only affects your bottom line but there are instances where CEOs have gone to prison because they ignored different laws and regulations.
No more can you just ignore regulations and pay fines because you think it’s cheaper, you’re facing jail time if you’re an environmental or financial scofflaw.
To stay compliant with the appropriate laws and regulations, you need a system that measures all the important stats and outputs. Next, you need to hire experts as consultants to stay abreast of all the changes in regulatory and compliance areas and constantly feed that back to you.
There’s no reason for you to try to keep up with all of that — you’ve got an operation to run. But, unless you can hire a full-time regulatory compliance officer, you need to outsource that to someone who makes it their life’s mission.
Next, you need to constantly test whether your existing systems and methods comply. That means running internal audits, measuring necessary outputs, and developing monitoring systems that can give you a dashboard overview of your various specs. And then you need to bring them to compliance with your consultant’s help.
For example, when I ran a manufacturing company in the oil and gas industry, I had to deal with the Environmental Protection Agency a lot. Rather than try to keep up with all of their regulations, I hired a Ph.D. who lived in that world to regularly review our methods and compliance. Those regulations changed at an alarming rate (particularly under the Democrats).
You want to know when new changes are coming down the pike so you can complain about them and lobby against them. But once those new regulations pass, you have to know that you can meet those obligations. And the only effective way is to make sure that monitoring and review are a part of your ongoing day-to-day function.
Tombstone Thinking
Oftentimes, manufacturers would ignore new regulations and only deal with them once the problems arose.
That’s tombstone thinking.
Many regulatory bodies just love enforcing their compliance efforts, and they’ll target a company and pore over it with a fine-tooth comb in order to find any and all violations that they can.
So it’s your responsibility to stay ahead of them to avoid some hefty fines and jail time. The fines can be so high because the violations become so egregious that you might as well shut down instead of trying to dig your way out of that hole.
That’s why hiring your regulatory consultants becomes important. Monitoring those regulations is part of their brief, and their job is to constantly keep you up-to-date on all the changes and regulations coming your way. That way, their work just becomes part of your overhead, and you don’t have to risk getting into trouble.
Prevention is Always Better Than the Cure
You’ve heard that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
We all have. But you would be surprised at the number of people who think they can avoid both the prevention and the cure, only to be hit with the high price of both, not to mention dealing with the disease in the first place.
Rather than playing the game and risk getting caught, it’s better to just get into compliance in the first place and avoid all the headaches. You may think you can avoid the high costs of adopting a new process because it costs too much, but you’re going to get caught. All the money that you saved will be lost and then some.
Rather than paying fines AND paying for the new process, just pay for the new process. Get it over and done with. Rip off the Band-Aid. Adopt the new process and get into compliance.
Then, pat yourself on the back in a few years when you hear about those poor suckers who just paid a few million bucks in fines because they thought they’d be clever. They still had to pay for their compliance, but now they’re a few million dollars poorer for their efforts.
I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Photo credit: ThisIsEngineering (Pexels, Creative Commons 0)