Budget season: the time of year when every line item is questioned, every dollar must be justified, and every program competes for executive attention and buy-in. But with tariff uncertainty and increasing product compliance sustainability requirements, you can’t afford to scale back your supply chain sustainability efforts. To stay ahead and protect your market access, you’re going to need resources and executive support.
But convincing leadership that compliance deserves investment can be a challenge, if you don’t focus your case on ROI. A well-supported program creates measurable value for your company. With the right approach, you can secure the investment you need to make compliance smoother, smarter, and more efficient in the year ahead. Here’s how to get started and make budget season come out in your favor.
Understand Your Cost Centers
Before you make your case, you need a clear picture of what drives your program costs. When you can show where resources and money are going, it becomes easier to explain where investment will have the biggest impact.
Team Members
Maybe you’ve already added staff or are considering it. But if your team spends most of its time chasing supplier data or filling out spreadsheets, adding people won’t fix the root problem. Every new hire comes with onboarding, training, benefits, healthcare, a 401K, and regulatory learning curves… to name just a few budget considerations.
Instead of adding new hires, focus your budget on supporting your existing team with a platform that makes them more efficient. Automated tools can take over repetitive work so you and your team can focus on analysis and strategy instead of administrative tasks.
Momentum Manufacturing Group (MMG) relied on Assent’s automation and extensive database of supplier data, allowing one compliance specialist to handle customer requests for over 10,000 products. Assent slashed the workload by 80%, and now MMG only needs to engage suppliers for special cases like custom orders for non-standard finishes. Read their success story here.
Regulatory Monitoring & Scoping
Regulations never stop changing, and keeping up with them can feel like a full-time job. Last year, 92 countries notified the World Trade Organization of 4,300 new technical barriers to trade, and that number has been growing by an average of 11% every year.
Some companies pay consultants to interpret updates, and others subscribe to regulatory databases that still leave gaps. A solution like Assent’s product compliance software includes built-in monitoring and insights from regulatory experts. You get updates in real time and can respond quickly, without burning hours researching what new rules mean for your products.
Supplier Engagement & Education
Supplier outreach can drain your team’s time and energy. You’re sending emails, following up across time zones, and trying to explain complex requirements to partners who may not even know where to start. Based on data from our supplier network, you can estimate how much time and money you’re spending on manual, basic compliance tasks:
- Five minutes per email to a supplier
- One hour a day validating supplier data
- Twenty minutes per simple supplier support ticket and 75 minutes for detailed support requests
- Four hours per customer request for compliance or sustainability data
- Two hours per day monitoring and interpreting new regulations and market requirements
- Two to four hours per week managing your different data and supply chain systems
Assent’s supply chain sustainability software automates this outreach, validates incoming data, and provides multilingual supplier training so you can stop micromanaging the process. That means fewer headaches, faster responses, and higher-quality data at less cost. Assent customer Ryerson recently estimated that it saved the equivalent of 20 FTEs by using the Assent Sustainability Platform when it started up its compliance department.
“Without Assent, we simply wouldn’t have the bandwidth to do it… In the last two years, we’ve responded to approximately 4,900 customer requests with Assent’s help.”
—Andrea Okun, Deputy General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer, Ryerson
Turning Compliance From a Cost Center to a Growth Engine
For many organizations, compliance has long been treated as a line item, something that protects against penalties but rarely increases revenue. That perspective is outdated. Thanks to interconnected regulations and market drivers, compliance is one of the few functions that can directly influence profitability and resilience against risk.
Risk avoidance itself drives measurable financial return. A single disruption, such as a shipment delay caused by new import restrictions or a forced labor violation, can erase months of profit. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, “On average, companies can expect losses equal to almost 45% of one year’s profits over the course of a decade” through exposure to supply chain risks.
The costly risks don’t stop there:
- Product sustainability: Since it came into force in 2022, the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) has stopped over 17,000 shipments valued at $3.7 billion, and denied over 10,400 of them
- Product compliance: Companies with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in their products are facing all-time-high levels of legal risk. Settlements for larger chemical manufacturers have reached over $10 billion, and now any company simply using PFAS is on the hook for water remediation costs and consumer lawsuits
Argon Medical Devices, an Assent customer, estimates that 100% of its revenue is tied to having accurate regulatory documentation. That means there’s enormous risk in relying on manual compliance management. To reduce their risk, and the potential impact to profits, Argon worked with Assent to centralize and automate its processes for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) Regulation; the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive; and PFAS due diligence. The result was 50% fewer resourcing costs to meet customer requirements and 80% less time to create compliance documents. Read Argon’s success story here.
Making the Case
To get your budget approved, you’ll need to translate your needs into business terms that resonate with leadership. Executives care about efficiency, risk reduction, and measurable results. Your proposal should connect compliance investment asks directly to those outcomes.
- Find your advocate: An executive sponsor in legal, operations, or procurement can help you show how compliance supports their own goals too
- Highlight cross-functional value: The data you collect protects compliance, but it also strengthens supplier management, product quality, and customer trust
- Show financial impact: Quantify the cost of being reactive, including lost revenue from shipment delays, reputational damage, or fines. Then demonstrate what proactive investment saves
When executives see that your plan reduces both risk and cost, it becomes much easier to get buy-in. And if you need support making your case, Assent’s team of experts can help you.
How A Complete Platform Reduces Your Program Costs
To get investment in your compliance program, you need to show how a new solution reduces your overall costs. Here’s how Assent optimizes your resources and productivity:
- Automatically reach out to suppliers and track responses instead of sending endless follow-up emails
- Get regulatory updates from our experts instead of searching through complex regulatory documents by yourself or paying expensive consultants to do it
- Keep all product and supplier data in one accessible platform for faster reporting
- Help suppliers understand requirements through built-in multilingual training
We give you time to focus on strategy and the initiatives that will move your company forward.
Did you know? Assent was named a leader in product compliance software by Verdantix in the first-ever Verdantix Green Quadrant: Product Compliance Software 2025 report. Download your copy now to see what makes Assent stand out.
Compliance Pays Off, Even When Budgets Are Tight
Getting budget approval is your chance to make compliance work better for you. You can reduce the manual workload that slows your team down, stay ahead of new regulations, and create a program that runs efficiently without constant firefighting.
Assent’s supply chain sustainability software helps you do exactly that. It automates supplier engagement, integrates regulatory intelligence, and gives you clear insight into every corner of your supply chain. Our AI-enhanced capabilities also help you predict potential compliance risks and uncover data gaps before they become costly problems. Investing now means less stress later and a stronger foundation for the goals you want to achieve this year.
Make this budget season a win for your team. Book a call with one of Assent’s supply chain specialists to get started.
FAQ: Budgeting for Compliance Programs
When making your annual budget for compliance and sustainability, here’s what you should keep in mind.
