Create a responsible workplace culture by implementing the right solution for your company.

Keeping up with ever-changing laws, regulations and industry standards can make your head spin. But neglecting to comply with them compromises safety and can result in legal action, financial penalties, reputational damage and costly downtime.

Managing compliance is complex, yet critical for procurement and maintenance managers alike. How can all these minute details and processes come together? By collaborating to adopt the best compliance management system that streamlines processes, decreases manual workloads and protects all parties.

What Is Compliance Management?

Compliance management is the work you do to ensure your organization meets all applicable laws, regulations, union requirements and internal organizational policies. It includes creating rules, policies and procedures around compliance as well as monitoring it and taking corrective action where needed. Done well, it’s an integrated structure holding all the documents, tools, processes, functional responsibilities and controls you use to meet legal, regulatory and industry-standard obligations.

Creating your compliance management system involves the following:

• Establish compliance responsibilities.
• Communicate responsibilities to all appropriate parties.
• Incorporate legal, regulatory, union and internal policies and procedures into workflow processes.
• Monitor operations to ensure compliance terms are being met.
• Intervene as early as possible where mitigative or corrective action must be taken.
• Review compliance performance and update processes, tools and documentation for continuous improvement.

ProTip: As you work to find the best system for your unique compliance management demands, collaboration across departments who will engage with it most is paramount. Ask questions, including what items must be covered and how the ideal system should be designed, communicated and implemented.

Why Systematize Compliance?

Many stakeholders–regulatory agencies, industry associations and trade groups, suppliers and vendor partners, shareholders and investors, company leaders and employees–are invested in the reliance a compliant business and workplace offers. This wide range of interested parties makes for a massive list of tasks and responsibilities to ensure every detail is managed, including:

• Staying up to date on external obligations.
• Establishing internal rules and policies.
• Setting controls to monitor, measure and manage performance.
• Communicating standards and initiatives.
• Training internal employees and external goods and service vendors.  

Failing to implement a comprehensive compliance management system puts your organization at risk of safety incidents, fines and lost revenue. And, when slipping compliance is not immediately addressed, it snowballs over time. By building out and communicating your solid compliance framework, trust is fostered from the floorhand all the way up to the bank.

ProTip: When critical issues or potential violations are flagged with an intelligently deployed and automated solution, intervention happens early in a transparent way that deflates explosive or volatile reactions. PayShepherd’s comprehensive digitized documentation protects your organization should an audit or investigation follow a non-compliant event.

Goods & Service Compliance Are Not Created Equal

Depending on whether you’re using your compliance management system to address goods and/or service providers, the complexity within necessary rules and requirements you include will vary and change over time.

Goods supplier compliance tends to be less complex because goods are tangible items that tend to come with standardized specifications. Typical compliance items may include:

• Product quality and safety.
• Environmental standards.
• Trade and customs regulations.
• Labor and employment standards.

Meanwhile, service vendor compliance is typically more complex and infinitely more difficult to manage because execution and regulation are more complicated. Compliance considerations may include:

• Professional standards that meet industry association and regulatory body mandates.
• Health and safety measures.
• Security measures to protect sensitive data and systems.
• Environmental standards such as hazardous waste management.

Understanding the different requirements your compliance management system must fulfill supports you to better organize its components including controls and monitoring, communication and worker orientation or training programs. In defining and sharing these measures, all workers can be assured they’re working in a safe environment where a culture of responsibility runs deep.

ProTip: If you’re considering upgrading your compliance management system, remember, the greater the complexity within your industry and your third-party workforce, the higher value you gain by investing in a more advanced solution.

The Spokes in Your Compliance Hub

Your compliance management system ideally serves as a central hub for all things compliance related. That includes all documentation, controls, data, performance metrics and corrective intervention procedures to be collected, stored and assessed. Because managing compliance is an ongoing endeavor, this is a live space that optimally keeps up with real time activity, change and improvement.

Compliance requirements change not only by industry, but by company, supplier or service vendor, even at the worker level. So, implementing a system that is tailored specifically to your worksite needs drastically decreases risk.

However, in general, a compliance program–including the processes and tools used to identify, monitor and mitigate risks– likely includes the following.

Company culture. Your company culture sets the tone for how all employees and onsite workers understand and respect compliance obligations. Establishing an ethical and accountable environment encourages all involved to take compliance seriously and abide by worksite policies and processes.

Communication plans and dissemination. Workdays can be hectic and best practices can fall by the wayside in the pursuit of meeting quotas and timelines. Communicate your compliance management plans and processes regularly across appropriate channels so they stay top of mind for all.

Compliance guidelines. As you create compliance guidelines for all involved parties, try to formulate them in the most comprehensive yet concise manner possible so general understanding is increased.

Compliance requirements and goals, ideally using KPIs for constant improvement. Excellent compliance management depends on your ability to keep up with regulatory and industry-wide changes and meet them. But exceptional leaders also seek constant improvement in performance and use data to create benchmarks they not only plan to meet, they aim to exceed.

Clear responsibilities with ownership attached. With each compliance responsibility defined into its own reporting line, it is equally important to assign a person to ensure each is monitored and managed.

Vendor partner list including defined guidelines for cooperation. Keep an updated list of all service vendor and supplier partners so you can ensure they’re kept informed of all compliance guidelines, policies and processes. It should not be assumed they keep track of them from client to client.

Training and orientation. Investing in training and orientation programs for employees and external vendors pays off in the long run. It sets the tone for what behavior is considered acceptable and unacceptable on the worksite as well as encourages more open two-way communication.

Methods for monitoring and intervening. Your compliance management system is only as good as your ability to enforce it. Vendor relationship management software can provide the data you need to create appropriate metrics and benchmarks as well as quickly review worker performance and understand where corrective action will improve overall efficiency.

Review and improvement. Compliance management is a work in progress. It’s more than implementing processes and guidelines. It’s also communicating with workers to understand that policies are being observed and processes followed. With that awareness, you’re better informed to make any improvement needed so workers champion your mission to achieve compliance excellence.

ProTip: Clear feedback loops support you to better identify compliance improvement opportunities. Use documented feedback to assess and confirm attitudes and performance around your compliance procedures. Then, use that insight to improve your system.

Be Audit-Proof, Digitize Today

The benefits in turning compliance management over to a digitized solution that automates compliance checks, disseminates the data each stakeholder needs to see and manages all related documentation are endless. Topping the list are safety, cost reduction and savings, time savings and increased focus on higher-value core business initiatives.

PayShepherd’s intelligent platform allows users across departments to view dynamic dashboards, generate custom reports and set auto-alerts around the specific information they require at any time. In a few simple clicks, any supervisor or associate can see a true picture of compliance performance and use data insights to conduct risk analyses.

Such high-level tracking of compliance policies, metrics and vendor performance supports an audit-proof business holding true, transparent and traceable proof of exceptional compliance. Disputes or claims down the line become a problem of the past.

ProTip: Your compliance management system platform should be surrounded by a team of qualified consultants with industry insider knowledge. This way, they can support integration and use of the software for all users and ensure the technology brings intuitive operation with value that compounds over time.

Take a Tailored Approach

PayShepherd’s vendor relationship management solution was built with boots on the ground understanding of how complex compliance management truly is. Our user-friendly software is supported by industry experts that our client partners continuously deem best in class for their customer service and support.

How can we help you elevate your compliance management system? Call us today. Let’s talk.

‍