How can we understand our level of policy compliance?
Ensuring policy compliance, and, ultimately, regulatory compliance, is critical in protecting your organization’s financial success. Beyond the obvious impacts of regulatory fines and penalties, there are also operational, reputational, and strategic impacts when policies aren’t followed.
Understanding compliance adherence throughout the organization and with vendors presents several challenges, from identifying requirements to assessing the level of adherence. However, an effective software solution can reduce the risks associated with these challenges and support the entire compliance adherence process.
Taking the first step towards compliance adherence
Once you have identified the regulatory requirements, strategic and operational guidelines, and codifying the process for minimizing these risks in policies, you are ready to engage in the process of compliance adherence. For many, this involves difficult-to-manage shared drives or repurposed document management solutions to organize and centralize policies, along with spreadsheets and other files to support compliance testing and cumbersome email communications with very limited tracking or auditability.
Why manual processes are a deal-breaker
Manual processes make an already challenging task even more difficult. Evaluating policies in the course of compliance testing can be inconvenient, and tracking what policies address various regulations each policy addresses is challenging or maybe outside the scope of compliance adherence. Examining compliance adherence in spreadsheets often requires meetings between front-line, or first-line of defense, staff and compliance, or second-line of defense, staff, tedious data entry, and time-consuming data aggregation processes to manually produce reports.
How automation is the key to streamlining your compliance efforts
In order to overcome the challenges presented by these common manual processes, you’ll want to automate as many processes as possible. Look for software solutions that offer workflow solutions or built-in automation or integrations that make the data aggregation process as streamlined as possible. Additionally, a solution that provides a single source of truth is going to provide unparalleled visibility into the compliance adherence efforts across the organization. Managers will be empowered to identify any gaps in adherence to the vendor management policies and these features should be fully configurable to support any policy of the organizaion.
Solutions
To help you build these foundational elements for successful compliance adherence, companies are turning to state-of-the-art software solutions to cost-effectively mitigate these potential risks.
Vendor Risk Management
A vendor risk management software solution like VendorInsight helps your company gain visibility into risk factors within your vendor network or supply chain, allowing you to mitigate problems before they occur and cause damage to your operations or enterprise.
Policy Management
A policy management solution like Mitratech’s PolicyHub saves time and improves efficiency, supporting effective policy management by automating and streamlining the processes involved, and removing the complexities and errors involved. So you can build an ethical and defensible compliance program.
Enterprise Risk Management
To gain true visibility into the risks threatening your organization, a next-generation solution for managing enterprise risk, like EnterpriseInsightTM, aggregates the risks from across your organization with unprecedented ease and insight.
Compliance & Obligations Management
A compliance and obligations management solution, like Mitratech’s CMO offering, uses a simple, intuitive interface to let employees and auditors be proactive in incident and audit management, including Volcker Rule obligations, controls, investigations, and non-conformance reporting. Easily report incidents, understand your obligations, and continuously improve your compliance performance.
Workflow Automation
A best-in-class workflow automation solution like Mitratech’s TAP is easy to adopt and use, and delivers nearly instant ROI as it allows form and process customization, reduces errors, accelerates workflows, builds collaboration, and provides automated archiving and e-signature integration, too.
