Manufacturing companies operate in a world of tight margins, global supply chains, and a workforce spread across many countries and time zones. For a compliance team inside a company like this, the challenge is not just building an ethical culture. It is finding a way to support that culture with tools that keep pace with the volume and complexity of the business. This is exactly the position Clarios found itself in, and it is why the company's ethics and compliance team decided to rethink how it managed reporting, investigations, and case management.
Clarios is a global manufacturer, and like many companies in this space, its compliance team operates with limited resources relative to the size and reach of the organization. Building a strong ethical culture was the team's top priority, but doing that well required a platform that could handle the daily mechanics of intake, investigation, and case resolution without adding friction. That search led Clarios to GAN Integrity's investigations platform.
A Company Guided by Its Values
Clarios describes its approach to compliance through a simple lens: it is not just what the company does, but how it does it. That principle guided the search for a case management solution. The goal was never to add more process for its own sake. It was to give a small, focused compliance team the ability to do more with the resources it already had, while staying true to the company's mission of powering progress responsibly.
Deborah Spanic, Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer for Clarios, explained the decision in practical terms. She said the platform needed to be simple enough to match the realities of a manufacturing business.
"The other piece that I really liked about GAN, related to the investigations and the case management, was that it was pretty simple and straightforward. For a company like ours, which is a manufacturing company, we're averaging somewhere between 20 and 30 cases coming in a month. We don't need a lot of complexity. We need it to be pretty simple, straightforward, and easy to use. And that was one of the things that really appealed to me about GAN."
The Global Compliance Director for Clarios, echoed that view. He uses the investigations case management module and the remediation module multiple times a day, and he found the platform more responsive than other tools he had used in the past.
"When we try to make it more complex, it gets harder to use, and we lose sight of what it is we're really trying to do, which is to have a tool that can guide us through a case well, allow us to document it very well, and make it easy for multiple people to use. GAN does that."
Solving a Real Operational Problem
For an international manufacturer, an easy-to-navigate incident management tool needs to work across language, time, and geography. Clarios has a headquarters that stays closely engaged with decentralized teams around the world, so the company values processes that achieve business goals without adding unnecessary boundaries between teams.
The GAN Integrity platform gave the Clarios compliance team a structured way to manage the full lifecycle of a case. It automatically keeps a record of documentation, logs investigative progress, and serves as a workflow guide that includes substantive remediation steps. For a team managing dozens of cases a month across a global footprint, that structure removed a significant amount of manual tracking and gave the team confidence that nothing would fall through the cracks.
The platform also helped Clarios strengthen its speak-up culture more broadly. Employees who do not feel comfortable reporting through a helpline now have a direct channel through the platform, and they can choose to report anonymously if they prefer. Managers are able to log formal complaints brought to them by their direct reports, which extends ownership of compliance further into the organization rather than keeping it centralized with a small team.
Decentralizing Case Management Without Losing Control
One of the more significant shifts for Clarios was the ability to decentralize case management while maintaining oversight. The platform's role-based access and governance infrastructure allowed the compliance team to establish a consistent escalation and delegation process, so that every concern reaches the right stakeholders without requiring a small central team to touch every case personally.
At the same time, the team retained a full overview of everything logged into the platform, and collaboration across the organization did not come at the expense of protecting sensitive data. This balance, giving more people the ability to participate in the process while keeping sensitive information secure, is often one of the hardest things for a compliance program to get right, and it was a central reason the platform worked for a company of Clarios's size and structure.
An Intake Experience Built for Real Users
Jill Stenseth, Senior Program Manager for Ethics and Compliance at Clarios, pointed to the intake form itself as a standout feature. Because the form is configurable, Clarios has been able to adjust it as the company's needs have changed, without waiting on a lengthy development cycle.
"I will say that GAN's intake form is awesome, and I always have good feedback from people who are using it, especially our other managers who want to submit on somebody else's behalf. It's really easy to use. Any changes that we've ever wanted have been simple and quick, so I think that's phenomenal."
That flexibility matters for a manufacturing company where the population submitting reports includes plant managers, supervisors, and frontline employees who may not interact with compliance software often. A form that is intuitive on the first use reduces hesitation and makes it more likely that people will actually use the tool when they need it.
A Foundation for Better Data and Better Decisions
Beyond the day-to-day case management benefits, Clarios also saw a longer-term impact from consolidating its compliance program onto a single platform. Connecting case management with other compliance processes, such as conflicts of interest and gifts, gave the company a more complete view of its risk landscape in one place.
The platform's integrated reporting and analytics tool gives the compliance team an array of data visualizations and tailored dashboards to measure the impact of the speak-up program and track performance over time. This shift allows the team to spend less time navigating clunky technology and more time focused on what actually matters: strengthening the company's culture.
Clarios also spoke to the value of the ongoing partnership with the GAN Integrity team, noting that responsiveness to feedback made the relationship feel collaborative rather than transactional.
"I feel like it's more of a partnership when those things are taken seriously and acted upon. The customer support, the proactive reaching out for feedback, the acknowledgement of the feedback, the actions taken to try to address that feedback, and then sticking to ease of use. Those are the things that I appreciate about GAN."
The Bigger Picture for Manufacturing Compliance Teams
Clarios's experience reflects a challenge that many manufacturing and industrial companies face. Compliance teams are often small relative to the size of the organizations they support, and they need tools that reduce friction rather than add to it. A platform that is simple to use, configurable, and capable of decentralizing case management without sacrificing oversight can make a meaningful difference for a team handling dozens of cases every month.
For Clarios, choosing GAN Integrity's investigations platform was ultimately about giving employees at every level the confidence that speaking up leads to a real, well-documented process, and giving the compliance team the tools to manage that process efficiently. That combination, of ease of use for employees and structure for the compliance team, has helped Clarios continue building a culture where doing the right thing remains the easy thing to do.
Hannah Tichansky is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at GAN Integrity. Hannah holds over 14 years of writing and marketing experience, with 9 years of specialization in Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Hannah holds an MA from Monmouth University and a Certificate in Product Marketing from Cornell University.