GRC – tools to conquer complexity

Every company aspires to be successful. Successful companies need to grow.  But with growth comes a new challenge – an increase in complexity. As an example, when a company opens a new branch office in another country there are a host of new laws and regulations that apply.   These new requirements will often impact the existing operations worldwide.   The growth in complexity can be exponential as growing companies enter new markets and become global players.

A consequence of this increasing complexity is the need to implement back-office systems that help manage critical business processes. Without an intentional effort to develop proper systems of governance, the company will rapidly become unmanageable as the new requirements increase beyond its internal capacity to keep up.  Backlogs start to overwhelm.  Eventually, things start to break and the losses accumulate.

GRC

Governance, Risk and Compliance (also known as GRC) are three important areas within a business that together ensure that the company can grow sustainably while managing increasing complexity. GRC incorporates the most important processes that help the organisation reach its objectives. These include amongst others enterprise risk management, performance management, compliance management and so on. These GRC processes are all inter-related. Furthermore, each process needs to support the companies strategy and contribute positively to performance.

Silos inhibit growth

During the startup phase, many of the GRC requirements are performed by the founders (initially) and then delegated to others as more people are employed. At some point in time as the organisation matures, the company starts to develop silos where departments or teams start to operate relatively independently and no longer in an integrated manner. It is in these siloed environments that GRC starts to fail, as more and more complex requirements come from both inside and outside the organisation. Keeping up with a range of changing regulations for example becomes extremely difficult if it is not handled in an integrated way.

It is not all bad. A natural consequence of successful growth is that silos will tend to form and many processes start to become stand-alone and isolated. Management is however responsible to recognise the warning signs when this takes place and take proactive steps to correct this problem before it worsens. Because much of this GRC related work is internally focused it might be seen to be less important than (for example) serving customers or entering into new markets. But one thing is certain, without a solid foundation of mature GRC processes in place, customer service and new market penetration will not be sustainable.

GRC Inside the Business Systems

Streamlining GRC processes is assisted tremendously by the business systems. Core ERP, CRM, SCM and manufacturing systems all have the potential to improve and streamline internal processes. When these core business systems work together in an integrated fashion, truly well managed GRC becomes possible.

Having identified that your core business system is key to the effective management of GRC, it is also important to realise that not all business systems are born equal. Most will need substantial additional configuration before they adequately support the governance, risk and compliance processes in a truly comprehensive way.

GRC 365 by Axnosis

Axnosis has developed a GRC add-on solution built inside Microsoft Dynamics, called GRC 365. Designed to empower Microsoft Dynamics customers with a complete set of GRC tools out the box, the Axnosis solution leverages the potential of the underlying ERP system to enable proper, managed governance, risk and compliance. Axnosis continues to invest in adding more capabilities to the GRC 365 solution to make sure that customers are well-positioned to address the changing demands of modern business.   There is no longer a need for you to do expensive configuration work or even custom development, the Axnosis GRC 365 solution incorporates proven best practices and streamlines the entire process enabling you to focus on the business requirements and not the technology.

If you want more information about how the GRC 365 solution can work in your business, please contact the team at Axnosis.