In product compliance, we have so many terms that involve the word “compliance”, it’s only natural. Is there a relationship between these terms? We are going to look at four terms specifically and how they relate to one another within the context of our product compliance solution.

First we have the foundation of product compliance, the compliance requirement. These are provided through our regulatory content service, and are continually kept up-to-date. Simply put, compliance requirements refer to the rules, regulations, and standards that organizations must adhere to in order to ensure that they operate legally, ethically, and securely. These requirements can be imposed by various entities, such as government agencies, industry bodies, or international organizations. The specific compliance requirements vary depending on the industry, location, and nature of the organization’s activities. An example of a compliance requirement would be the Global Automotive Declarable Substance List (GADSL). As mentioned, these are updated frequently, therefore you have to activate new versions when they become available. However, it is possible to have two active versions of the same compliance requirement.

The next level would be the compliance purpose. This is a set of compliance requirements for supporting a specific business process within the same country or regions. An example of this could be the “import of chemicals for industrial use to the United States”.

Now that we have the compliance purpose, a compliance view is created. This is a collection of data for an unpackaged product or raw material. The data of a compliance view includes compliance information such as assigned products in the product master, logistics roles, compositions, applications, assigned markets and production locations, assigned compliance purposes, and related packaged products.

All this leads us to our last term, compliance assessment and this is exactly what you would expect, a test. It’s the result of a process in which regulatory and customer-specific requirements are evaluated. More precisely, each compliance assessment evaluates one compliance object (product, raw material, supplier raw material, chemical customer material, or substance) against one compliance requirement version. For dangerous goods management, for example, products have to be classified according to dangerous goods regulations and approved or rejected for transport.

Here are a couple more quick tips:

• You always have to release your data for it to be used in follow-on processes. All data must be filled in for a compliance assessment to happen
• When you activate a new compliance requirement version, this can lead to changes in a compliance assessment
• When a compliance purpose is unassigned, all compliance assessments, to which it was assigned, disappear – this is also one way to delete an “in progress” compliance assessment

Compliance is an ongoing process, and organizations are striving for continuous improvement. Regular reviews of policies and procedures, as well as staying informed about changes in regulations, are essential to maintaining a strong compliance posture. Hopefully, if you made it this far, you were able to take away at least one new and useful piece of information.