As energy compliance becomes more complex and demanding, organisations must ensure that their internal operations can keep pace with the rate of evolution.
Most organisations rely on their reporting process to modernise energy risk management because a well-thought-out energy compliance report provides helpful insight into how compliance procedures are evolving to meet increasingly complex demands.
However, most organisations struggle to turn their reporting procedures into efficient procedures that generate additional value because they are time-consuming and resource-inefficient.
To ensure that the reporting process provides transformative value, organisations need to modernise reporting procedures. In this blog, we explain the challenges of creating compliance reports and how to overcome them.
What are some common challenges compliance teams endure?
Compiling energy compliance reports means handling several challenges that could hamper the process. Here are some of them.
Creating reports for stakeholders to understand
Compliance reports contain a lot of information, for they have to adhere to energy compliance frameworks and ensure they are covering regulations and critical operations not directly categorised as energy regulation, such as GDPR.
The need to account for so many frameworks can lead to a complex report filled with technical terms and abbreviations that can be difficult for business stakeholders to understand.
The lack of congruence is a clear challenge for most organisations because senior business leaders need to understand the data presented to draw full value from the report. Hence, compliance teams must maintain a precarious balance between conveying detailed, complex information and making it accessible.
Ensuring the officer creating the report is not overburdened
Creating compliance reports should be the responsibility of an experienced compliance officer and their team.
However, creating reports is one of many responsibilities for an experienced officer. Between capturing regulatory updates and relaying them to business operations, compliance officers have a lot of responsibilities, which could eat into what little time and resources they have to compile reports.
Furthermore, officers need to draw information from different business units and compare them to internal business operations before writing a report, which takes time, especially if they rely on traditional methods.
Hence, the challenge for most people is to create compliance reports without burdening personnel with needless, inefficient processes.
Are the contents of the report accurate?
The content of a compliance report needs to be accurate, relevant, and transparent. The reports should give detailed explanations of an organisation’s compliance procedures and explain the compliance processes used to achieve these aims and the criteria to establish these goals.
To write a compliance report, officers need to pull information from different data sources, ranging from departmental reports to customer complaints. In addition, the data-gathering process itself should be heavily scrutinised with regular checks to ensure information was accurately measured and collected.
Compliance officers must ensure that the data used in the report creation process is accurate and reliable, meaning that a solid verification process must be integrated into report creation to ensure the validity and reliability of data. The need to verify data while creating the reports only lengthens an already complex and time-consuming process.
Creating reports at regular intervals is costly
Improving compliance procedures requires ongoing monitoring and assessment, which means that officers need to create energy compliance reports at regular intervals.
However, this also creates another challenge because compliance officers have to regularly create detailed, informative compliance reports.
This could create a problem over the long run because compliance reporting would strain resources, making it harder to justify regular reports.
To work around this problem, organisations need to consider different ways to streamline report creation to give compliance officers the means to compile detailed reports while reducing the cost and time required to create them.
This is where automation becomes critical.
Why resolve compliance challenges with automation
Automation can remedy the report creation process by simplifying the process while reducing the number of resources required to complete them.
Instead of relying on a labour-intensive process dependent on manual software, such as spreadsheets, compliance officers can use automation technology to streamline the process, allowing them to create reports while reducing the time and resources needed to make them happen.
This is because automation platforms leverage NLP and advanced analytics to collect and break down large volumes of regulatory content, making it easier for compliance officers to highlight gaps and other critical measures, streamlining the report creation process, and reducing the workload on important personnel.
Moreover, the platform has several features that help organisations streamline the process. For example, it comes with several features where regulatory policies and processes can be presented in a visual format where compliance officers can convey complex data in graphs and bar charts.
With these features, compliance officers can make reports more accessible and easier to read to critical stakeholders, making it easier for executives to understand the progress and challenges of compliance procedures.
In addition, it becomes much easier to verify and ascertain the accuracy and quality of data used in the compliance report because these platforms leverage advanced analytics and AI meaning that officers do not have to check the validity of the data they are using, further simplifying the process and reducing their workload.
Simplifying report creation for better compliance management
With organisations subject to complex energy regulation procedures, they need to implement a process for reporting their compliance status to ensure that they are meeting requirements, closing gaps, and following best practices as per industry requirements.
Given the importance of report creation in compliance management, organisations need to ensure that their reporting process is simple and efficent while still meeting the complex demands of energy compliance.
This is where automating reporting becomes critical; you can convert a cumbersome process into a more efficient, value-oriented one.