There is a rising need for businesses to employ compliance management systems or programs and many companies are fraught with the task of transitioning from the old and out-dated memory and excel-based systems.
Compliance monitoring or auditing is one of the toughest to implement and execute – especially in a globally-spread business. Therefore, you would require a solution that has various key components that are designed to take responsibility for many administrative chores and make life simpler for you.
So let’s dig deeper into the seven most important elements of an effective compliance program or compliance software solutions:
- Management of the questionnaire
Firstly, you would need complete control on the setting up and maintenance of various audit checklists for all the regulatory frameworks you need to work with. This way, you can standardize the compliance software solutions processes and ensure delivering consistent outcomes.
- Design a security-enabled workflow and plan a corrective action management
Different kinds of audits might have varying workflows and your system should permit you to control which specific users can view and/or modify audits at every stage. This audit process should earmark-compliances or breaches and your compliance management system software should be able to find and track every single issue until it is properly resolved.
- Granular security management and help multiple auditing bodies
Your system should be able to accommodate multiple internal and external users, and also assign suitable rights to view some particular data items and perform certain functions. Your compliance management system software should be able to accommodate several auditing bodies and classify their individual auditors.
- Safeguard the dashboard for external parties and build a self-assessment capability
The external parties should be able to view their data through a dashboard. This helps you to display reports, analytical data, scheduled audits, planned corrective actions, and also the historical data to relevant people. A good compliance management system or program must also help and encourage suppliers and facilities to become compliant. The compliance software solution should enable its users to perform their self-assessments if needed so that they can stay compliant, or can prepare for a forthcoming vendor audit.
- Risk-aware and easy-to-use compliance management
The best is to stratify your facilities as per the probable risk and your system should accommodate this. At the time of the audit, your auditors should be able to key in responses in real-time using a web browser. This helps to speed up the process, decreases the audit and reporting time, reduces error, and offers a single point of audit capture. Audit questionnaires should always be easy to go through and have automatic scoring, corrective action generation, and should enable the auditor to record any observations or notes, and finally upload pieces of evidence for any question.
- Notifications and complete mobility
You should have a compliance program that enables you to configure your email communications system so that you can loop in all the stakeholders and save you the cost of an admin for tracking who has to get what and when. The solution should also offer an array of trigger points, which can initiate emails. Therefore, firstly, for your compliance management system software to function effectively, it should be web-based and should support various browser platforms. In case you have suppliers based in foreign countries that do not have good internet services, then your system should support some mobile audit tools like tablet apps that help you to perform audits in such areas.
- Cost-sharing and support of top management
Executing a globally-accessible compliance system is a huge task and it has an attached cost. It is advisable to contemplate a fee for participation in your compliance management system or program, which will help in offsetting the total cost of designing and maintaining the system. You can offer a self-funding solution to your company’s top management. You definitely need their support to implement the system run it successfully.
Other than the seven elements mentioned above, it is imperative to hire some support services if the task seems daunting. When looking for such a provider, the most important thing to consider is the relevant experience in the compliance field.
Thus, executing a compliance management software India will not only safeguard your company or business, but it will also bring a wide range of advantages to your business. It will enable you to build a stable and strong supply chain, as you can identify suppliers on whom you can rely. A good compliance software solution would also help you introduce consistent business processes that would enable your company to grow.
