When it comes to legislation, companies face many challenges on the road to compliance. There's legislation around how the business must be run, but there are also standards that need to be adhered to that vary according to the business that you're in. All of which means that most organisations spend an inordinate amount of time complying with various requirements in order to stay in business.
The steps to complying with legal and other binding requirements are simple: set up processes, manage them and measure - or audit - them. However, in practice this can be time-consuming and require more specialised skills than the company has on hand. Deltalink Consulting CEO Gerrie Terblanche says, "By digitalising the processes involved and incorporating them into your organisation's general business processes, compliance becomes a lot more manageable."
Depending on the industry that they're in, businesses face a range of compliance requirements around legislation and industry standards, including ISO and OHSAS and even legislation pertaining to the highly regulated industries, such as pharmaceutical, food processing and manufacturing. Regardless of the regulation or law, the bottom line is that organisations have to manage large amounts of possibly sensitive information in compliance with the relevant industry requirements.
Documents, whether in paper or digital format, have to be retained for a prescribed period of time - and done so securely - and businesses face fines and liability issues for non-compliance.
Terblanche says: "There are companies that prefer to store paper documents for the required timeframe. However, this does have its downside. Obviously there's the challenge around the sheer mass of paper that this represents, but over and above that, there's the manual labour involved in filing and organising these documents, not to mention finding a relevant document should it be required down the line."
The bottom line is that it's no longer practical to have paper documents filed away somewhere, or have the documents available in digital format, but not managed efficiently. The other issue around compliance is having the necessary skills in-house to ensure that the business is compliant. Terblanche says: "Companies should ask themselves whether they want to dedicate a resource to overseeing compliance, and what happens if that person is ill or leaves the company? How do you ensure continuity without duplicating resources? Also, how can functionaries put their hands on the relevant documents when they're needed or be notified when new documents are released or existing documents are updated (ie keep track of new versions)? How can management get a view of the state of compliancy of the organisation at any time? And who is gate-keeping the gate-keeper?"
All too often, the burden of compliance impacts on the business, slowing it down to a point where it is at a competitive disadvantage because it's allocating too much time and energy in trying to remain compliant, instead of focusing on its core business.
Terblanche advises organisations facing the abovementioned issues to consider digitalising their compliance management using an enterprise content management (ECM) approach, which allows the consolidation of large amounts of information (or documents) so that it can be easily searched, viewed and managed. The latest versions of documents are always available and compliance-related workflows can be automated, substantially simplifying compliance for the business - and boosting productivity.
He says: "Implementing an ECM system to also manage compliance-related content and processes can significantly reduce the company's risk of regulatory compliance violations. It also opens the way for the company to go the data analytics route - which all organisations wanting to be competitive are going to have to do, if they aren't already - as the massive amounts of information that any business routinely gathers from various sources over time, is now centralised and accessible."
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