Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML
Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML

© Fraunhofer IML - Leonie Goral

© Fraunhofer IML - Leonie Goral/ Jennifer Pris

cognitive compliance & collaborative compliance

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Digital for compliance

The Challenge

The logistics and production departments of a company have to face increasing compliance requirements. The adherence to different laws, guidelines, administrative regulations as well as ISO requirements is indispensable, since non-compliance with these can result in high fines and criminal offences. In addition, disregarding growing customer requirements leads to a loss of orders, damage to reputation and thus to dissatisfaction for all parties. These developments challenge many companies from the industrial sector with a multitude of complications. What is more, many companies lack the necessary overview of legal and regulatory requirements as well as expert knowledge and hence struggle with deriving clear instructions for action for their own use case. In addition, companies often have to spend a lot of time and effort into manually entering and evaluating data in order to comply with legal requirements.

 

Our vision

The aim of cognitive compliance is to create decision-support systems up to autonomously acting systems for a legally compliant operation. For this purpose, a self-learning system is to be developed by using Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the evaluation of digital impulses with the help of artificial intelligence. This system enables the early detection of violations of compliance and may initiate preventive measures in the form of recommended actions.In addition to saving manual effort, another advantage is the system’s a complete, transparent verification and traceability. On this basis, legal security is guaranteed within the company.

Together for compliance

The challenge

The increasing digitalization of processes in logistics and production confronts many companies with the challenge of creating legally compliant processes. This includes the requirement to apply the extensive laws and ISO standards in a compliant manner within the company. Especially within the supply chain of a company or several partners, numerous challenges arise. Particularly with regard to compliance aspects such as data integrity, the conditional trust within value-added networks is a major problem. Evidence-based verification often proves to be a further source of error, since compliance along the supply chain is often not processed in digital form. This creates the challenge of making the right data available to the right partner at the right time, and especially in the right quality.

 

Our  vision

The vision of collaborative compliance is the consistent compliance of companies along the supply chain and the automation of processes based on smart contracts and collaboration technologies such as distributed ledger technology (DLT). The use of these technologies enables a secure and transparent verification of compliance data in production networks and supply chains, since regulatory and contractual verification documents can be exchanged with authorization and, in addition, complete traceability of compliance is guaranteed.