Who should own regulatory monitoring?

Short answer

Regulatory monitoring should have a clearly accountable owner, often regulatory affairs, product stewardship, compliance, or product safety. Individual topics may need specialist owners across legal, sustainability, HSE, quality, R&D, procurement, or commercial teams. The important point is that every material signal has an owner and escalation path.

Avoid the Shared Inbox Trap

Many monitoring processes fail because everyone can see the update but nobody owns the next step.

A shared inbox can help visibility, but ownership, status, and decision history need to be explicit.

Separate Watch Ownership from Decision Ownership

The monitoring owner may run the watch, but the response may sit elsewhere. A labelling update, supplier questionnaire, customer disclosure, or legal interpretation can each need a different accountable team.

Good workflow keeps those hand-offs visible.

Frequently asked questions

Can monitoring be centralised?

Yes, but centralised monitoring still needs distributed review by people who understand products, markets, and obligations.

What is the risk of unclear ownership?

Signals may be read but not acted on, or the same update may be reviewed repeatedly by different teams without a shared decision record.

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