Your company’s compliance with relevant laws and regulations can save you time and money in the form of fines, fees and legal action. This relevance means that having the ability to track the changing of and compliance with regulations is crucial to maintaining a consistent and compliant workflow. Many software solutions are designed to help track the changing regulations, monitor how well your company is complying, and alert you to possible non-compliant situations. The right solutions for your business will depend on which industry you work in and the products or services you produce, but the highest-rated solutions all have some critical features in common.
Compliance Workflows
Compliance software often allows you to assign tasks to each team member with due dates and track potential workflow issues. This feature allows you to identify bottlenecks more accurately before the team’s flow stops and incorporate new or different compliance tasks into established workflows seamlessly. For instance, Machine Learning Operations solutions, often called MLOps, can streamline the workflow and compliance issues between teams to help you deploy and manage better AIs more quickly.
Risk Management
In simplest terms, you take on risks for non-compliance every time you work on a project and managing that risk can help ensure that you stay within the framework of relevant laws and regulations. Compliance software solutions are designed to monitor, evaluate and manage these risks automatically, freeing you up for less tedious tasks while still alerting you to non-compliance issues as they arise. The software will also classify functions according to assigned risk levels so you can manage the highest risk tasks first.
Audit Trail
After completing a project, successful or not, you will need a report or audit to learn from any mistakes before starting a new project and show compliance throughout the process. Compliance software solutions can create an audit trail to automatically record the tasks completed and the steps taken toward each task. Some platforms will even display this tracking data on the team dashboard so everyone can follow along with the progress in real-time and without sending countless update emails.
Compliance Calendar and Reporting
Your compliance software solution should work with your scheduling to assign and track both individual tasks as well as overall project completion. This software can also report on the relevant laws, and regulations your company, team and project need to follow so everyone is on the same page and fewer non-compliance mistakes are made. By scheduling and tracking compliance tasks, your software solutions can help you report on your company’s compliance more efficiently and provide a record of completed tasks if needed.
Policy Management
Having one central place to keep all of your policy and procedure outlines can make it easier for employees and management to find relevant ones to sign or reference. These policies should be accessible through a platform that aids management with updating them as needed, seeing which employees need to sign critical papers and identifying the best time for a refresher course for each team. Your compliance solutions can also track changes to laws and regulations your company needs to follow and alert you when policy or training changes are needed.
Compliance Alerts
Since your compliance software records your work and progress, it can also send alerts to team managers when tasks are completed or when problems are reported. You can even use these alerts to show you failed or delayed tasks, allowing managers to spend less time monitoring each team member and focus more time on other tasks while providing more detailed notice of when to step in to help team members.
While each industry will have different laws and regulations to follow, most companies will be looking for similar features for their compliance software solutions. These solutions should help companies ensure that each employee is complying with applicable laws and regulations, that compliance tasks can seamlessly fit into the workflow of projects, and monitor each task’s delay, success, or failure.