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Planning Your Compliance Management System
Compliance has never been more important! Every industry has its own rules and regulations, with global, national and local legislations also shaping an organizations management. A compliance management system can help provide the framework for adhering to the relevant standards. It can also ensure your organization achieves this in a structured, well-organized way.
What is a compliance management system?
Compliance management systems are used to help organizations meet the regulatory requirements. They are designed to reduce the risk of non-compliance and also improve operational efficiency.
A compliance management system (CMS) is software that helps organizations meet regulatory requirements and therefore reduce the risk of non-compliance. They improve operational efficiency by reducing the time spent on manual tasks such as data entry, document storage, and reporting. It helps organizations meet regulatory requirements and reduces the risks of non-compliance by automating tasks.
Why You Need a Compliance Management System
A compliance management system helps to ensure that all of the necessary steps have been taken to meet regulatory requirements. It also helps in identifying risks and vulnerabilities, as well as creating a compliance plan for the organization.
You could create a manually run compliance system, but you would need to be super-efficient with filing paperwork. For larger organizations this would quickly prove to be too complex. Additionally, the risk of not being able to provide the necessary evidence of compliance, should something go wrong would be too great.
Using an IT system for your compliance would mean that
1) All of your policies were stored securely
2) You have electronic records of who read them and when
3) Reports and records could easily be searched if needed and used as evidence of compliance
4) Employees and individuals can be kept up to date easily as requirements change

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Practical steps when planning compliance
Whatever system you choose for your compliance management system, there are common considerations:
Understand the laws, legislation and regulations relevant to your organization
The first step in understanding these is to know the basics of what they are. Laws are the rules that a country or society has to follow. Legislation is the law or rule that is passed by a legislative body like Congress or Parliament. Regulations are laws that govern some specific area of activity, such as food safety regulation for restaurants.
There are many types of laws, legislation and regulations that affect organizations. Some examples include: copyright law, trademark law, antitrust law, environmental protection law, labor laws and health care laws. Obviously, you need to focus on the ones that are relevant to your organization.
Set your organizational policies
The second step is to set your organizational high level polices to meet the obligations you identified in the previous step.
Create lower-level procedures
Procedures are the foundation of an organization. They are what makes sure that every person in the organization is doing their job correctly.
For example, if you have a policy for employees to take at least one day off per week, then it's just an extended version of your procedure for employees to take time off. Procedures should be created with the goal of making sure that everyone in the organization is doing their job correctly. They should also follow company policy guidelines.
Choosing your compliance management system
There are many factors to take into consideration when choosing a compliance system for your company. These include whether you need a cloud-based or on-premise system, if you need to track financial data, what type of workforce management tools you want to use, and how much customization you want.
The good news is that there are many CMS options available, which will help you decide what type of system best suits your needs. Take the time to compare and contrast the different types of systems available so you can find one that works for your company.
We have been developing policy compliance solutions for SharePoint for over 12 years.
We understand how Compliance Managers struggle to ensure all employees have acknowledged critical documents like policies or procedures.
That's why we created DocRead, a tool that allows you to distribute policies, procedures, and important documents to employees and track acknowledgments, ensuring employee compliance and accountability.
All without leaving SharePoint.
Want to see how we can save you time and automate your employee compliance?
DocRead has enabled us to see a massive efficiency improvement... we are now saving 2 to 3 weeks per policy on administration alone.
Nick Ferguson
Peregrine Pharmaceuticals
Feedback for the on-premises version of DocRead.
Benefits you can expect
Ensure compliance and accountability
Set recurring assignments to ensure critical policies are read and acknowledged at regular intervals
Track progress and completion
The DocRead Compliance Cockpit summarizes the reading statuses of all assignments across the organization so Compliance Administrators can quickly get the complete picture
Fully integrated with SharePoint
DocRead seamlessly integrates with SharePoint content, without changing your documents or metadata