Whether you’re an outside adviser, in-house counsel, or someone charged with implementing enlightened compliance procedures, this practical and erudite guide helps you decipher complex regulations and standards.
Effortlessly meet management, legal, regulatory, contractual, and voluntary obligations with structured policy management tools. Keep up with regulatory change using automatic horizon scanning capabilities.
Identifying Your Obligations
Using a compliance management system makes it easier to identify obligations, including identifying and managing the associated risks. This means you can minimize the likelihood of compliance breaches and ensure you meet regulatory requirements and industry standards. This can help you avoid penalties and fines and lower your risk of legal consequences, primarily if you work in a highly regulated industry like healthcare.
Ideally, your compliance management software will provide a document storage capability that supports version control and secures documents so they are only accessible to authorized users. It will also allow you to create and deliver compliance training content and track employee progress. This is particularly important for regulated industries where employees may need to demonstrate proof of compliance, such as nurses and orderlies at a hospital.
A good compliance management software will help you cut through the regulatory clutter by identifying only the obligations that apply to your business. You can focus on strategic compliance management consulting and less time on administrative tasks.
The best compliance software will provide a calendar of compliance check events, allowing you to plan any preparatory activities (like information gathering or meetings) and follow-up activities, such as ranking and addressing any findings. It should also provide an automated alerting capability triggered by a date so you can easily record when your obligation is due to be checked.
Defining Your Obligations
Managing compliance obligations is challenging, but it can be much easier when you have a good system. Many options exist, whether you’re looking for an automated process to manage policies and training or a solution that allows you to record the details of all your compliance-related tasks.
This platform assists companies of all sizes in maintaining their regulatory obligations and lowering the non-compliance risk. It includes a central repository for all compliance-related data and a workflow engine for allocating tasks to individuals or teams and tracking their progress through various stages. It also supports document storage, version control, and document security.
Another feature of compliance obligation software is the ability to create a risk assessment and management process. This feature enables companies to monitor and assess risks across all functions and provides the tools to identify gaps and close them with action plans and audits.
Creating Your Obligation Inventory
With so many projects and contracts, keeping track of all your company’s obligations to its clients can be challenging. That’s where compliance obligation software can help. A good platform will provide a centralized contract repository and allow legal and business teams to view their portfolio of contractual obligations easily. This will make it much easier to complete all essential deadlines and remember to fulfill obligations.
Another benefit of a robust compliance management technology is the ability to build an audit trail for creative asset evaluations and approvals, which reduces back-and-forth email exchanges. This helps creative teams deliver work faster and ensures they are meeting brand review standards. It’s also a great way to automate workflow processes and reduce manual steps when sharing assets.
Finally, a good compliance software solution will also allow you to create and manage risk profiles within your company. You can do this to detect and evaluate risks in every aspect of your business, set up activities for risk mitigation, and provide in-depth reports. It will also allow you to monitor and apply regulatory updates to your internal compliance framework, ensuring your organization meets current industry standards. This will shield your company from penalties and fines for breaking the law.
Managing Your Obligations
Using compliance obligation management software, your organization can capture all your mandatory requirements, voluntary commitments, industry standards, and contractual agreements in one place. Captured obligations can be automatically validated against raw performance data and then ingested into the system, which enables obligation fulfillment through scheduling, recurring, or triggered tasks.
A central dashboard will provide ultimate visibility into the status of your obligation management process and help you keep track of all your upcoming, overdue, or completed obligation tasks. Automated notifications can also be set up for obligation task owners to ensure they are kept on-task. In addition, the capability to generate graphical reports will provide you with crucial insight into your obligation management process.
Creative teams often work on tight deadlines to get work out the door. They don’t need another layer of bureaucracy to complicate their workflows. An easy-to-use digital solution can help them manage creative production processes and make compliance more accessible without removing creativity. Its cloud-based solution offers a centralized platform for managing policy documents, training materials, and compliance obligations.
