In today’s fast paced world, enterprises which operate on an international level face multiple challenges regarding their Compliance. The high amount of sanctions, policies and laws which have to be obeyed makes it difficult to ensure compliant behavior throughout an entire corporation. At the same time, high penalties make it more important than ever to follow and fulfill official guidelines and policies.
The ebm-papst Mulfingen GmbH & Co. KG, an international corporation with over 15.000 employees, faces exactly the same problem. Like many other companies, ebm-papst wants to use digital technology to enforce compliant behavior – not only for its main organization, but also for all of its sales organizations and contract manufacturers. In 2019, I had the task of doing exactly that – using digital technology to ensure the compliant behavior of ebm-papst’s sales organizations in Europe.
One of the most important aspects of Compliance for manufacturing companies like ebm-papst is the export control. Export control itself has various aspects, yet all of them have something in common: They all try to make sure that a company does not sell illegal or classified products to persons or organizations who are not allowed to possess them. For example, a huge aspect of export control is to enforce sanctions from different countries and supranational organizations like the European Union by screening potential business partners.
To ensure the Compliance of ebm-papst’s sales organizations, I planned and executed the implementation of an automated sanctioned party list screening (SPL screening) which automatically screens every potential business partner of ebm-papst’s sales organizations in Europe in order to determine whether they are affected by any sanctions. All of this happened in the SAP ERP system of ebm-papst.
During this project, I became familiar with the legal foundations of Compliance. For example, I learned which actions a company is legally required to take in order to avoid illegal activity and under which circumstances an enterprise can be charged for neglecting their Compliance.
Additionally, since the SPL screening interfered with many business processes of the sales organizations, I had the ability to broaden my understanding of business processes. I had to determine the best time for the SPL screening to ensure that it didn’t interrupt a potential sale too late, causing unnecessary costs on the side of ebm-papst’s sales organizations. At the same time, I had to modify the processes so that after the SPL screening was finished, nobody could manipulate the workflow to bypass a negative SPL screening result.
Finally, after I had finished the implementation and successfully tested all of the changes, I trained the users who were going to be affected by the new SPL screening and showed them how they should handle a negative screening result.