As of 2020, India was the 5th largest automotive market, with 3.49 million units sold in the passenger and commercial vehicles categories.

Between 2020 and 2021, the automotive sector received a cumulative FDI inflow of about $30.5 billion. It is also expected that the sector will generate approx. $8-10 billion in local and foreign investments by 2023

Compliance is on top of the industry’s agenda.

Our Client is one of the top 5 Automobile manufacturers in India with 17 offices across 22 state operations. They are a multi-national company headquartered in one of the metro cities in South India with over 14,000 employees producing over 2,000 vehicles per day.

Our Client has a complex compliance environment with a large number of time based, event based and on-going compliances. There were day to day challenges around:

• Applicable Acts and Compliances
• Timely and relevant Legal Updates
• Penalties on account of delays
• Lot of time spent on getting status of compliances across the company
• Poor visibility into residual risks
• Missed compliances on account of human errors
• Ad-hoc, People dependent and Manual tracking
• Poor awareness of risks arising out of non-compliance

Our client needed a solution which could help them improve visibility into their compliances. An ideal solution would help them bring greater control, visibility and efficiency into compliance management. Their compliance team needed a solution that could help provide reliable assurance to the Board. In addition, there were several compliances that were driven from their global headquarters which India team had to follow. They needed the system to support all their internal compliances as well.

TeamLease Regtech engaged with the client in Jan 2018. A team of Compliance subject matter experts visited their headquarters for a period of 1 week and met their leadership team.

Phase 1 - Business Discovery

This phase of the project was focussed on understanding their business to establish the applicability of Acts / compliances. Comprehensive information were collated via in-person interviews / meetings / discussions with key stakeholders in the company. The following items were collated:

• Business Set up (Group, Entities, Sub-Entities, Locations, number and nature of establishments, Industry)
• Products & Services (Type of Products / Services, Equipment and Machinery set up etc)
• Mandatory repeatable items driven from their global headquarters
• Legal Notice & Legal Case configurations including specific data fields to capture model numbers and vehicle description

Phase 2 - Compliance Applicability Assessment

In this phase, TeamLease Regtech team analysed all the information gathered and created a comprehensive list of applicable Acts and compliances by:

• Entity / Sub-Entity
• Compliance Category (Labour, Finance & Taxation, EHS, Commercial, Secretarial, Industry Specific & Other Local Laws)
• Equipment
• Establishment

The team identified over 100 lifting tools and tackles. In addition, there were 4 paint shops, hundreds of compressors and weighing instruments, variety of chemicals including hazardous materials and waste. There were over 14,000 employees categorised into skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled, full time, part time and contract labour.

The client employed a combination of internal and third party physical security agencies to guard their plant and units spread over several hundred acres.

The above lead to applicability of over 100 Acts with over 4500 compliances. These included several hundred permissions, licenses, returns, over a thousand different types of registers and displays every month. There were 95 different users identified who were mapped to performers, reviewers, approvers and management roles.

Phase 3- Implementation

This phase is the longest and the most critical phase of the project. During this phase, TeamLease Regtech assigned a 5 member team of subject matter experts to work with the client’s project team. This phase lasted about 4 weeks during which the following items were accomplished:

• Map the Client Organisation (Group, Entities, Sub-Entities, Locations, Departments)
• Review of identified applicable Acts and Compliances with respective department heads
• Discussion on identified gaps with department heads and compliance head
• Mapping of Compliances to specific users along with their roles
• Hands on training sessions with user groups based on their locations and roles
• Activation of system for a predetermined go-live date

It has been over a year since the client has actively used the system. During the course of the year, several review meetings were conducted to resolve specific post implementation issues. TeamLease Regtech conducted additional training sessions for newly inducted staff on need basis.

Today, the client has migrated from an ad-hoc, people dependent and paper based compliance program to a predictable, process based and digital compliance program. The Compliance officer is enabled with real time dashboards empowering her with a comprehensive view of the status of compliance based risks across their organisation in India. This has enabled her to make appropriate interventions to contain risks arising out of non-compliance resulting in improvement in on-time compliance. In addition, her ability to provide more transparent assurance to the board has improved drastically. Since then the client has implemented Litigation Management Module covering all their statutory notices and cases across the country.