Manufacturers, retailers, brand-owners, distributors, and suppliers today face the need to ensure that any materials purchased from suppliers comply with the regulations of different countries in which they do business so as to achieve growth markets and increase speed-to-market. Established in 2003, Decernis was founded with a vision to assist suppliers and manufacturers in managing and complying with such intricacies of global regulations. The company delivers comprehensive solutions and expertise to support compliance, safety, and risk management through a synergy of intelligent systems technology, global research, and big data analytics. The solutions delivered by Decernis can easily integrate with clients’ processes while holding the record of encompassing more than 90,000 global regulations in 207 nations as of this date.

The core focus of Decernis is to provide a simple, automated process to collect, manage, and validate supplier compliance documentation to ensure that all products meet regulatory, market, or customer requirements across their supply chain. To this end, the company brings in a high-performing Supply Chain Management (SCM) solution to provide businesses an actionable and collaborative workflow for purchasing materials and handling supplier data with greater transparency, speed, and accuracy. The solution also offers a secure document warehouse, complemented by a user-friendly compliance reporting system, to organize and manage compliance documents for individual materials, chemicals, or ingredients.

The uniqueness of Decernis lies in its search lexicon that contains 5 million terms across 40 languages for chemicals, commodities, and concepts. It can not only search final regulations but also monitor and track global events in real time via horizon scanning, Decernis’ intelligence-gathering big data analytics solution.

Another capability that Decernis offers is to examine any sort of growing regulatory changes around the world and collect the information through a discovery engine. The information is then cross-referenced against the 5 million terms to create profiles for companies to instantly evaluate business risk and produce trend analysis of regulatory developments.

Being able to pierce regulatory complexity with the right questions is an extraordinary resource

In the context, Decernis’ CEO, Andrew (Pat) Waldo refers to a case where one of Decernis’ supply chain clients was facing problems with their supplier documentation. As the documentation was stored manually in a SharePoint system, there was no ability to check the information that was submitted or provide the key to organize the information by product or bill of materials. The questionnaires that were sent out were merely static documents. At this point, Decernis deployed its SCM solution that pre-analyzed the submitted questionnaires to determine if there were missing answers or expected information so incomplete questionnaires could be rejected and sent back automatically to the supplier until the baseline expectation is met. Additionally, the data from the questionnaires was made searchable and could be extracted to identify all suppliers that use a particular material. This resulted in reducing risk, time, and cost for the client.

Currently, Decernis has clients that manufacture animal/ human food, consumer goods, packaging and restricted chemicals. Of late, the company has forged relationships with governmental agencies worldwide at a diplomatic level which gives it a competitive advantage. Per Waldo, “It is a win-win situation where we assist governments with information from our system in exchange for a dialogue where we can ask questions. Being able to pierce regulatory complexity with the right questions is an extraordinary resource.”

Hinging on an established approach to find “regulatory truth”, the team at Decernis translates their passion into being the best at what they do—helping businesses tackle compliance issues in their supply chain. In the long run, the firm plans to expand its horizon scanning capability for trend analysis alongside developing practitioner leadership.