The number of multinational engineering firms has exploded over the last few years. There are now more companies than ever before that offer engineering services in dozens or even hundreds of places all over the world. This can bring a number of challenges to these businesses, which will find themselves having to deal with complex regulatory regimes that vary from one place to another and the difficulties that can come with managing staff who may never visit a central office. Fortunately, there are several solutions to this that many of the most successful engineering companies have wasted no time in adopting. This article examines a few of them.
Regulatory Challenges
Engineering firms often overcome regulatory issues by choosing the most stringent version of a code that they operate under and sticking to it. This approach, known as ‘gold plating’, can allow companies to do business in countries that may have poor reputations for safety and oversight. By ensuring that they always hold themselves to the highest possible standards, even if they are not legally obligated to do so, companies can quickly develop an excellent reputation for quality work in parts of the world where this sort of thing is essential.
Managing Staff
Ensuring that all employees understand what is expected of them and represent the company in the best possible way no matter where they are can be a considerable challenge. Simply distributing a change of policy to tens of thousands of workers who do not have a common language can take weeks if the right tools are not in place. This is why many engineering firms have turned to companies such as omniaintranet.com to build intranet services for them that make it easy to get this information out to their teams. Crucially, the systems don’t just distribute information but require anyone downloading it to confirm that they have read and understood any documents that are given to them. This is very important for businesses in the engineering sector, which tend to have very stringent compliance processes to meet.
By ensuring that the right tools are in place, engineering firms can meet their compliance challenges, no matter how many countries they work in.