What is a Compliance Management App?
Compliance management software tracks, monitors, and audits business processes to align with applicable legal, industry, and security requirements, organizational policies, and consumer standards.
Upon startup, businesses formulate codes of conduct or corporate bylaws. These documents become the basis for setting compliance rules and regulations. They also provide guidelines for how the organization will abide by regulatory compliance and how it plans to follow internal and external compliance measures.
To effectively establish a compliance management system, businesses must use the most effective compliance management best practices. Effective compliance management requires clear policies and guidelines, efficient compliance monitoring, and regular compliance audits.
Compliance software handles all these business processes and regulatory requirements. It helps you monitor adherence to industry-specific regulations and standards such as:
- Quality management and assurance procedures and rules
- Environmental sustainability policies and social responsibility
- Specifications and codes of products, services, or designs
- Health and safety regulations
- Employment guidelines
- Privacy requirements
- Ethics
- Security measures
- Laws and regulations
- Risk management
- Generally accepted principles
- Processing and reporting guidelines
Compliance management software solutions help compliance managers oversee and manage all internal compliance rules and regulations. Regulatory compliance software, such as Lumiform, makes monitoring effortless. It identifies risk areas in the business and provides any sanctions and benefits for adherence as needed.
Why Do You Need Compliance Management Software?
Tracking compliance requirements is a tedious process that involves data collection and decision-making. Compliance management software automates these processes. Here are a few reasons why you need compliance management software:
Reduced Legal Problems
Avoiding legal issues is one of the advantages of compliance management software. All businesses must follow specific legal, financial, environmental, institutional, corporate, social, and government policies and frameworks. Regulatory compliance software ensures your organization avoids penalties, fines, and lawsuits.
Enhanced Operations and Process Efficiency
Internal and external audits foster innovation and system improvements. Compliance management software uncovers areas for improvement through reports gathered from evaluations, audits, and checklists.
Effective Team Collaboration and Communication
Streamlining communications related to compliance issues makes solutions more effective. Compliance management software is a platform that allows employees and leaders to relay issues and incidents quickly and easily among those involved.
Facilitate Informed and Compliant Decision-Making
Compliance management software makes it easy to decide on issues where the company’s legal and financial integrity are at stake. The app escalates issues and delegates corrective actions by facilitating efficient communication and proper documentation. Doing so solves problems immediately.
Better Brand and Company Reputation
The best compliance management software solutions ensure your company meets environmental standards, employee welfare, and other requirements. You can flaunt these compliances in your marketing creatives, showing your edge against your competitors. Customers prefer eco-conscious brands. About 64% of Americans don’t mind paying more if a product is environmentally-friendly, according to aGreenPrint survey.
What Are Some Techniques for Ensuring Compliance?
We all know a few brands that find loopholes in regulations to their advantage or take compliance lightly. Organizations like these eventually get caught not playing by the rules. The result? Hefty fines and reputational damage, to name a few.
Ensuring that you are operating according to the law requires these techniques:
Staying Up-To-Date With Laws and Regulations
Compliance requires going through a continuous process of staying informed about laws and regulations, identifying their impact on your business, adjusting policies to meet the requirements, and implementing those policies.
Getting the Help of Specialists
Small businesses that have no in-house lawyers may unintentionally break laws. Small business owners can be transparent in how they do business to avoid issues with authorities, but the better alternative is to hire consultants to ensure the company’s operations are compliant. The specialist can also help pick compliance management software solutions for your organization.
Ensuring Employees Adhere to Standard Procedures
Company policy is not worth anything if employees do not follow it. Policy changes may be challenging to adapt, and employees can get reluctant to follow standard operating procedures. It is necessary to involve human resources specialists in this process.
Scheduling Regular Compliance Audits
Regular compliance audits uncover lacking and inadequate policies that get in the way of compliance. The compliance auditor must be objective when doing the audit. Compliance management software may be capable of providing compliance audit templates to make internal auditing easier.
Using the Right Compliance Management Software
Compliance management is complex, especially without the right tools. Make it effortless with regulatory compliance software. Compliance management software solutions reduce human error, helping organizations operate according to the law.
What Are Some Examples of Compliance Issues?
Compliance issues expose organizations to legal penalties, damaged reputations, and financial loss. These issues result from failure to comply with laws and regulations.
The following compliance issues may hurt your organization:
Corrupt and Illegal Practices
Legal compliance ensures that the organization, its agents, and employees abide by the industry’s laws and regulations. Common compliance issues involving illegal practices include money laundering, bribery, fraud, theft, and embezzlement.
Privacy Breaches
Privacy violations are an everyday compliance issue. Hacking, malware, and viruses are some of the cybersecurity risks affecting organizations. Ensure you have solutions for protecting client data and preventing privacy breaches if your organization handles sensitive information.
Environmental Issues
Environmental compliance risks include business operations that cause pollution and ecological damage. Integrate sustainability practices into your business processes and train your employees to help them observe environmental compliance. Doing so helps your organization avoid issues including poor hazardous waste disposal practices and the use of harmful chemicals.
Poor Workplace Health and Safety Protocol
Companies have the legal obligation to follow health and safety protocols enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Their European equivalents are the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA).
Occupational Health & Safety Management is one of OSHA’s required practices for safety and health programs in the workplace. The agency recommends businesses to:
- Prioritize worker safety and health
- Eliminate hazards in the workplace
- Provide enough resources for implementing safety and health program
- Demonstrate and communicate safety and health programs to employees