People generally view compliance as a mandate, or an unpleasant must-do to stay on the right side of the law. While this is often true, doing compliance right also brings business benefits in terms of customer trust, brand loyalty, improved operational processes, and the enhanced ability to identify and manage business risk. Occasionally a compliance process can itself be a compensable service offering.
“While these concepts may be appreciated in the board room and C suite, the trick is to make well-tuned compliance a reality in the business. It is not enough to aim well – to succeed you must hit the target,” said Ken Sigmund, Global Compliance & Risk Mitigation Executive.
Ken Sigmund, Global Compliance & Risk Mitigation Executive
A good case in point is Ken’s recent employer. Aerospace & Defense represented his company’s largest single market and nuclear power engineering a large emerging opportunity, yet the company had no export compliance program controlling its cross-border transfers of technology – and this was limiting its access to some potentially huge business opportunities.
Ken was brought in as a change agent to design and deploy an export compliance program that was right for this company and its business. In assessing this challenge, “I found no organizational sense of export compliance, nor of the value in having (and being able to demonstrate to clients) an effective compliance program. However, I did have top-level sponsorship and mid-management willingness to make things happen.”
‘Making things happen’ required that Ken establish a complete, ITAR-grade compliance program from scratch. He first conducted a needs identification and analysis study that informed his team’s authorship of an overall policy, a technology control planning template, detailed procedures, and program documentation. Since the company was already operating to ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 standards, Ken made sure to integrate the new export control program within these existing quality and information security frameworks.
“It was critical to build awareness and buy-in at all levels in the company,” so working with the company’s education and training group, Ken and his team created an education plan that included recurring basic compliance awareness training for everyone and advanced training with continuing education obligations for practitioners. “I also worked closely with HR to add the appropriate background checks to their recruitment and on-boarding processes. Then, I took the new program ‘on the road’, pitching the proactive compliance program and articulating the value-add benefits to existing and potential clients, which opened doors and brought in new business.”
The company was able to tap into the ‘boom’ of defense offset business as India retools its military, generating $10s of millions in new business while mitigating the risk of regulatory non-compliance. Ken and company were also ready when the opportunity came to partner with a major civil nuclear power firm in standing up a nuclear engineering center in India, a first of its kind capability which has generated over $85 million in engineering services revenues since inception.
Mastering regulatory and technical issues are important, but so are people skills and I was at ease moving about in top management and board circles, and also in mid-level engineers to articulate a positive vision and build buy-in at all levels, coaching and training – these were the critical success factors.”
Watch full video interview below
Contact Ken Sigmund via LinkedIn or his Career WebFolio.
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