As energy regulators pass ambitious updates to incorporate the latest green and digital technology into business operations, compliance becomes more complex.
This presents a problem for most organisations that are burdened with the responsibility of finding and incorporating regulatory updates into their business processes.
The problem in compliance updates comes from an overburdened regulatory team that takes significant resources to meet regulatory requirements.
This turns compliance into an inefficient process that is perceived to be time-consuming and bogged down by red tape.
However, it is possible to turn compliance management into an efficient function by tweaking regulatory operations.
Read on to will explore what steps are needed to create a business energy compliance strategy to follow operations and minimise compliance penalties.
Creating a business energy compliance strategy
Keep track of regulatory updates
As regulatory bodies make rapid updates to the law, energy organisations need to devise a system that would enable them to collect and incorporate the latest updates into their business processes.
Fortunately, multiple RegTech solutions allow organisations to do that with the regulatory tracker feature.
Energy organisations can use the platform to track updates from different regulatory institutions and send these updates directly to your regulatory team.
This would allow organisations to keep up with the latest updates in regulation without spending a significant amount of time or using resources.
Standardise energy regulatory taxonomy
Organisations operating throughout the UK and Europe would have to deal with inconsistencies, overlaps, and gaps in regulations across different countries and regions governed by different regulatory bodies.
A standard regulatory taxonomy in line with the organisational hierarchy can help account for regulatory rulings from different regulatory bodies.
Furthermore, a standard taxonomy ensures that terminology, language, and structure are common across multiple parties, ensuring that organisations comply.
Moreover, it helps organisations categorise and store regulatory data to categorise, store and deliver the latest updates without frequently modifying rules and linkages, without spending a significant amount of time on compliance management.
Conduct regular compliance assessments
Accounting for compliance gaps is critical for ensuring that organisations are not violating regulations and suffering expensive penalties.
To prevent this from happening, organisations should consider conducting an internal audit at regular intervals.
The initial audit can help you ensure that different business units are working within the requirements set out in compliance requirements.
Following an initial assessment, organisations can take it a step deeper and carry out a detailed impact analysis on an update to identify which risks, controls, policies, procedures, training, and reports could be compromised.
The assessment would provide a strong basis for making amendments to business operations to ensure that they comply with regulations.
Have a process for regulatory change management
There must be a plan for regulatory change management in order to turn energy compliance into an agile process.
As regulatory bodies pass new updates, organisations will need to adjust their business operations.
To accomplish that, they will require the efforts of their entire organisation to do so, including different business units and departments.
This is where a standard workflow becomes critical because it can ensure that financial organisations are constantly in compliance. It would also ensure that stakeholders have insight into how the organisation is meeting their compliance requirements.
To make this process easier and more achievable, organisations can use a robust regulatory change management solution that leverages useful features like automation and multi-dimension mapping to turn compliance into a more centralised function across business units and geographies.
Having this solution can help organisations streamline regulation, convert it into a more responsive process and put them in a better position to respond to regulatory updates.
Creating a business energy compliance strategy
A suitable business energy compliance strategy allows organisations to adjust their company processes following regulatory updates without delays or inefficient procedures.
With energy regulatory updates transforming the industry, it would take agile, efficient procedures to ensure that organisations are in compliance and are more than capable of meeting these new requirements without delay.
With these processes in place, organisations can not only avoid compliance fines and penalties that could lead to short-term and long-term repercussions that could undermine business performance and financial outcomes.
An energy compliance strategy can help organisations reap the benefits of compliance management while minimising the drawbacks of regulation.