Learning to Make Exceptions:

How flexible software empowers us in an unpredictable world.

The pandemic has disrupted operating models of businesses across the globe. Since the beginning of 2020 – and since the launch of our company in 2006 – LogicManager has been working with our clients to help them pivot and prepare. We have over 15 years of experience under our belt of helping customers avoid all sorts of risks and scandals.

Over this past critical year, we’ve collected over 200 value stories from our customers about how they’ve leveraged our guidance to drive their businesses forward. This series delves deeper into those stories in hopes of helping other businesses throughout these challenging times.

Topic: Creating a formalized policy exception process to prevent inefficiencies and mitigate regulatory risk.

Company Profile

This LogicManager champion is in the business of chemical production. They produce clean, high quality products like paints, plastics and electronics, and serve clients in a wide variety of professions all over the world – from automotive repair, to energy consumption, architectural coatings and more.

This company is on a mission to improve the jobs and lives of millions of working class Americans, and in order to do so, they must effectively meet the challenges of today’s unique moment. They are committed to becoming more reliable by fostering safety and staying environmentally responsible.

Challenge

With all of that in mind, it’s no wonder that environmental regulations are a top-of-mind concern for our client; they are a chemical company developing products that touch millions of people, and with that comes the responsibility of making sure their products are not only effective, but safe and environmentally friendly.

On top of maintaining that balance, as an international organization, when COVID-19 disrupted businesses across the globe you can only imagine the operational difficulties. They faced challenges related to production, shipping and overall coordination of services to their partners both in and outside of the U.S.

With a responsibility to serve their clients and the environment, this client has had a formalized Policy Management program for years. In order to stay organized and prevent negligence, they understood the criticality of standardizing their processes.

But 2020 brought unprecedented circumstances and rapidly evolving regulations at the nationwide, state and local levels. This put their current Policy Exception process to the test – and like many other organizations, they realized tracking exceptions through excel spreadsheets, emails and other manually driven processes was hindering efficiency and exposing them to risks outside their tolerance.

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How We Helped

Given the fact that our client has employees and clients across the world, they undoubtedly require a strong Policy Exception program. This will not only to track current exceptions and the potential risks they pose to the organization, but it will also operationalize the approval process and easily engage the appropriate parties involved for their various business units.

Our LogicManager Advisory Analysts knew immediately after partnering with this organization that implementing a sound Policy Exception process would help to efficiently operationalize their manual processes and easily alleviate coordination efforts across multiple departments and countries.

LogicManager quickly proved to be the perfect platform for meeting this champion’s needs. We were able to build a customizable Policy Exception incident form, and configure automated processes for approval and annual review. Through our reporting capabilities, this client was able to leverage our custom data exports to easily understand the total exceptions currently “open” or “in review,” as well as their corresponding risk levels. Their dedicated advisor also created reports to demonstrate their total number of policy exception requests, exceptions in their initial request stage, active exception requests and rejected exception requests.

By aggregating this information and understanding how their policy exceptions were being raised across the world, this champion not only saved time and resources on their previously manual processes, but they also gained a holistic view of their organization by understanding how their risk level as a company was influenced by all policy exceptions.

Business Outcome

The most immediate and direct positive impact this Policy Exception process has delivered is efficiency. Only six months after the process was implemented, our champion reached out to tell us that there had already been 44 policy exceptions reviewed in LogicManager.

Here are some long-term benefits this client will realize as they navigate through the remainder of this pandemic and beyond:

• Protection from negligence – Proving that an incident did not materialize as a result of negligence can be an arduous process when you must pull from various sources and compile reports from scratch. This can make it difficult to prove you were not negligent in any given circumstance. By using LogicManager to manage and track their policy exceptions, this client will be prepared to provide evidentiary support at any time on how they’ve been governing their policies and prove that everything has gone through the proper approvals.
• Responsible business scaling – This client is in a much better position to grow their business internationally now that they’ve increased efficiencies. They have more time left on the table to dedicate to operational strategies, they’ve gained back time and energy, and they’re now partnered with a software that enables them to take a risk-based approach to everything they do; so they can rest assured that no matter how large they grow, their risks stay under control.
• Adaptability – This defined and iterative Policy Exception process allows this organization to continuously meet the ever-evolving regulations of their industries on the local, state and federal levels. Our system will automatically notify them when regulations relevant to their business have been updated, and our AI tool will continually demonstrate actionable steps for maintaining compliance. On top of the external benefits, the application is completely customizable, giving them the internal benefit of adding tools and functionality on an as-needed basis.

Last but not least, this client is primed to uphold their corporate values of providing high quality products and maintaining environmental responsibility. Strong policies are the backbone of any successful organization, and this client’s policies will never stand in the way of their mission to improve millions of lives around the world.