PRESENTATION SUMMARY: Elevating Compliance by Applying Lean Principles

Presenter: Raimund Laqua, P.Eng., PMP.

Date: November 20, 2025

For Compliance Officers and Managers

When compliance becomes operational—which is necessary to meet performance and outcome obligations—you need a method of improvement that focuses on operational systems. This is where LEAN comes in. However, LEAN has to adapt its principles to work with compliance.

This presentation explores 10 lean principles and how they are used to improve compliance performance. If you're looking to reduce your compliance costs, don't stop there. Improve value creation with better compliance as well. This is what LEAN COMPLIANCE is all about.

Why Operational Compliance Requires Different Improvement Methods

Most compliance teams are stuck managing compliance as separate programs rather than operational systems. But when your organization has performance and outcome obligations—not just rule-following requirements—compliance must become operational. It must deliver results, not just demonstrate activities.

Once compliance is operational, you need improvement methods designed for operational systems. Traditional compliance improvement focuses on better documentation, more training, or tighter controls. But operational systems require systematic improvement methods that address flow, waste, variation, and capability—exactly what lean principles provide.

The challenge? Standard lean principles assume compliance is waste to be minimized. For operational compliance, lean principles must be adapted to recognize compliance as value-creating capability that needs optimization, not elimination.

How Lean Principles Adapt for Compliance Performance

1. Value and Waste

• Traditional Lean: Value is what customers pay for; compliance is non-value-added waste to minimize

• Lean Compliance: Value includes stakeholder trust, risk reduction, operational license; compliance waste (over-regulation, excessive auditing, firefighting) stems from uncertainty in compliance systems

2. Flow (Push/Pull)

• Traditional Lean: Smooth movement of materials/work through production processes using pull signals

• Lean Compliance: Pull promises rather than push obligations—organizational levels pull the promises they need from above rather than having compliance requirements pushed down to them

3. Value Streams

• Traditional Lean: Map material and information flow from customer order to delivery, eliminating non-value steps

• Lean Compliance: Map "compliance streams"—the end-to-end flow of how obligations transform into operational capabilities and delivered outcomes, treating compliance as its own value-creating process

4. One-Piece/One-Touch Flow

• Traditional Lean: Process work items individually through each step without batching or queuing

• Lean Compliance: Handle compliance requirements individually through assessment-design-implementation-verification without batching (e.g., 5 days monthly monitoring vs 20-day annual audits)

5. Poka Yoke (Mistake Proof)

• Traditional Lean: Design processes to prevent manufacturing defects or catch them immediately

• Lean Compliance: Use behavioral design and environmental cues to make correct compliance actions easier than incorrect ones, replacing training-enforcement with system design

6. Jidoka (Automation with Human Touch)

• Traditional Lean: Machines stop automatically when defects detected, workers solve problems

• Lean Compliance: Build compliance monitoring into operational processes to signal when going off-track, enabling real-time correction rather than periodic audit discovery

7. Visual Management

• Traditional Lean: Make production status, problems, and standards immediately visible to everyone

• Lean Compliance: Real-time dashboards showing rule adherence, system performance, and outcome delivery—compliance status as transparent as production metrics

8. Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment)

• Traditional Lean: Align strategic objectives with operational execution through cascaded goal deployment

• Lean Compliance: Connect compliance strategy to business strategy through "catch ball" dialogue, ensuring compliance priorities serve business objectives

9. Pursuit of Perfection

• Traditional Lean: Continuous elimination of waste and improvement of customer value delivery

• Lean Compliance: Continuously improve organizational capability to deliver compliance outcomes and keep increasingly sophisticated stakeholder promises

10. Respect for People

• Traditional Lean: Engage worker knowledge for production process improvement and problem-solving

• Lean Compliance: Leverage frontline operational knowledge to design better compliance systems rather than imposing top-down compliance controls

What This Means for Your Compliance Performance

Reduced Compliance Costs: Eliminate waste in your compliance processes—over-documentation, redundant activities, firefighting, and rework. Focus resources on activities that actually improve compliance outcomes.

Improved Value Creation: Better compliance creates stakeholder value through enhanced trust, reduced risk, and operational excellence. This value becomes a competitive advantage, not just a cost of doing business.

Enhanced Operational Integration: Compliance becomes part of operational excellence rather than a separate overhead function. Your compliance capabilities enable business performance instead of constraining it.

Systematic Improvement: Apply proven improvement methods to your compliance systems. Move from ad-hoc fixes to systematic enhancement of compliance capability.

Implementation for Compliance Professionals

First, operationalize your compliance—get all programs working together as integrated systems focused on outcomes, not just activities.

Then adapt lean principles specifically for your compliance context, recognizing that compliance creates value that needs optimization.

Finally, apply these adapted principles systematically to improve both compliance performance and value creation.

This approach is proven across highly regulated industries including oil & gas, financial services, healthcare, and government sectors. The EPA has applied lean principles to environmental regulation for decades, demonstrating that operational compliance improvement works.

The Bottom Line for Obligation Owners

You are accountable to meet obligations—regulatory requirements, voluntary commitments, stakeholder expectations. You have two choices: continue managing these obligations as overhead to be minimized, or develop them as operational capabilities to be optimized.

When obligations have performance and outcome requirements—as most now do—compliance becomes operational. And when compliance is operational, you need improvement methods designed for operational systems.

Lean Compliance provides those methods. It's not about doing compliance faster or cheaper (though both happen). It's about building compliance capability that creates value while meeting your obligations reliably.

If you're already looking to reduce compliance costs, don't stop there. Use these adapted lean principles to improve value creation with better compliance as well. That's how you transform accountability from burden into competitive advantage.

Your obligations aren't going away—they're getting more complex. The question is whether you'll develop the capability to meet them systematically, or continue managing them reactively. Lean Compliance gives you the systematic approach.