Businesses today are organised in increasingly complex ways often driven by a range of factors including, a higher number of channels to market, offshoring and outsourcing, shorter product life cycles, the growing importance of emerging markets, and the need for greater functional integration. These factors also increase the need to establish and monitor highly effective and efficient control systems. Breakdowns in control can cost a lot of money to rectify and damage a company’s reputation, if not its very survival in these difficult economic times.

The well controlled company makes more money than the poorly controlled one – the trick is to implement controls intelligently and on the basis of risk. At times of business change, it is essential to focus on the control implications of this change and the new financial, operational and compliance risks that the business change brings. By doing so, the reorganised processes are more resilient and sustainable.

Critical to achieving all this is the organisation’s culture. People need to not only be brought on a journey to understand the need for change in compliance, control and risk practices, but given the motivation, tools and support to bring it into their everyday ways of working. Without a strong controls culture, efforts to sustain compliance and controls could be wasted.

Click here to watch the Lloyds Register client case study