Regulated organizations devote a considerable share of their time to proving they comply. They collect readings, consolidate records, watch limits, and produce reports. Much of that effort is manual work on data the operation already captures.
Thousands of hours a year
The National Association of Manufacturers in the United States put numbers to the effort. More than 63% of manufacturers spend over 2,000 hours a year complying with federal regulations.
The tail of the distribution is even more revealing. More than 17% of manufacturers spend over 10,000 hours a year on compliance tasks. For those organizations, compliance equals the annual work of several full-time people.
The cost is, above all, labor
The composition of that cost is worth a close look. According to the same association, 68.4% of compliance costs in manufacturing correspond to labor, and only 13.4% to equipment. Complying is, first and foremost, staff hours.
And part of those hours go to repetitive tasks: collecting data, consolidating records, checking that variables stay within limits, preparing the period's report. These are data-based tasks and, by their nature, automatable.
The manual process also fails
High effort does not guarantee a good outcome. A compliance practice heavy on paper and manual steps increases the probability of error and raises operating costs. A poorly consolidated data point or a report with an error exposes the organization to findings and penalties.
Compliance data is already captured
The monitoring that underpins compliance already produces the data continuously. Environmental variables, consumption, process conditions are measured all the time. The distance between that data and the regulatory report is manual work that can become an automatic, continuous, and reliable process.
The conclusion is clear. Compliance consumes thousands of hours, those hours are its largest cost, and part of them go to tasks that data analysis can take on.