Sustainability & Risk / Compliance / Background Data - Compliance

Defining Compliance Levels

Compliance levels indicate the degree of compliance that your organization has achieved for a compliance program, requirement, contract, contract term, or location. For example, you could define levels of 0-Lowest, 1- Very Low, 2-Low, 3-Medium Low, and so on. The numeric assignment enables the application to run a workflow rule to average the compliance levels entered. See About Compliance Levels

Note: If you change the Compliance Levels provided in the HQ and Schema databases, you must make sure that there are no gaps in the level number sequence for all records in the Compliance Levels (regcomplevel) table. For example, if you use only three levels, make sure they are consecutive (0,1,2) (3,4,5), not (0, 3, 6). The workflow rule that calculates average compliance levels requires that compliance levels have no gaps..

In some geographic areas, there may be officially prescribed terms that must be used for certain regulations. By entering the compliance levels for your programs or their requirements, you are able to generate reports to evaluate the programs that put you at the greatest risk, or those for which you have had the most success.

For example, you can generate the Compliance Programs Map report and select to color-code the markers by Compliance Level to visually assess the potential compliance issues around the world. Or, you can generate the Compliance Program Count by Compliance Level and Regulation report, a horizontal stacked bar chart comparing total program counts across regulations, stacked by Program Compliance Level. This report is color-coded to enable you to quickly identify the regulations that have the highest number of programs with low compliance levels. You can drill down to see details for the programs contributing to the total.

About Maintaining Compliance Levels

You can associate compliance levels with programs, requirements, or locations. It takes more effort to update information at the requirement and location levels, but doing so enables you to perform more detailed analysis. For example, if you want to be able to evaluate locations by their compliance level, you will need to enter and routinely re-evaluate compliance levels for your locations.

A guideline for getting started might be, for critical programs, consider updating compliance levels at the requirement level, and/or the location level. For less critical programs, update only at the program level.

Procedure: Defining Compliance Levels

Use the Define Compliance Level task to define the levels of compliance used by your compliance programs and requirements. When Compliance Managers enter the details for a program, they can associate a Compliance Level with the program or its requirements by selecting from the Compliance Levels you define. You can then generate multiple reports that show your data by compliance level.

To define compliance levels:

1. Select Background Data - Compliance / Define Compliance Levels task.
2. In the Select Compliance Level pane, click Add New.
3. In the Define Compliance Level pane, enter the following required information:

   Compliance Level Code: Enter the unique identifier for this compliance level.

   Level Number: Select the number that indicates the level of compliance. Select from 0 to indicate the lowest level of compliance to 8 to indicate the highest level of compliance.

4. Enter the following optional information:

   Summary: Enter a brief description of what this compliance level means.

   Description: Enter a more detailed description of this compliance level. For example, you could provide the specific issues that this compliance level presents.

5. Click Save.