Sustainability & Risk / Compliance / Compliance Program Manager

Best Practices for Developing Compliance Data

Successfully managing your compliance programs requires developing comprehensive data. Data is needed to track regulatory requirements and their many scheduled actions (referred to as events), and to provide documentation of your efforts when needed for a regulatory audit. For this reason, the Compliance application provides features to facilitate data entry and to reduce the time and effort required to develop your compliance data.

Note: Contract Managers can take the same approach as outlined below when developing contracts and contract terms.

Develop your Regulations, Compliance Programs, Requirements, Contracts, and Contract Terms

To begin, you add information for the following basic components of your compliance programs:

• Regulations, initiatives, or standards: Organizations typically have regulations that govern their activities, standards that define their best practices, or internal initiatives that address some aspect of the organization's goals, such as energy or waste reduction. Regulations, initiatives, or standards are the top level for organizing your compliance data, and enable you to report on and locate information by the regulation the compliance activity derives from.
• Compliance programs: Compliance programs organize requirements, responsibilities, and compliance levels, so that you can track and manage your compliance efforts. Similarly, contracts organize the contract terms.
• Requirements: The specific actions that are needed to comply with a regulation. Many requirements must occur on a recurring basis, others are scheduled on an as-needed basis; scheduled occurrences of a requirement are referred to as events. Tracking requirements and their events enables you to ensure timely completion of these actions and to target problems as they occur.

Developing this hierarchy organizes your data so that you can locate specific information when you need it. You can then choose to add locations, documents, communications logs, and notification templates to the regulations, compliance programs, and requirements. See The Regulation Hierarchy for more information.

Develop the Level of Detail you Require

Before developing your compliance programs and contracts, take some time to analyze the level of detail that you require. You can always add on to the information if you start at a more general level. For example, to get started, you may want to enter just a contract and a few of the most important contract terms. You can store the contract document in the document field so that you can refer to all the specific terms when you need them. Or, you may want to enter the overall cost for a compliance program, rather than the specific costs of each requirement.

Developing Compliance Records

The Manage Compliance Drill-down (Manage Contract Drill-down) task provides a console from which you can efficiently add regulations, programs, and requirements using one view and a drill-down list to facilitate your selections. This task provides the quickest way to add information for regulations, programs, and requirement, although you do not also add locations, documents, communications logs, and notification templates from this view. See Manage Compliance Drill-Down.

After using the drill-down tasks, you can:

• Bulk assign locations: Use the Manage Compliance Locations task to bulk assign locations to your regulations, programs and requirements as needed. Location information is needed to assess the risk at specific locations and to evaluate compliance by locations. See Making Bulk Location Assignments and Updates.
• Bulk assign notification templates: Use the Manage Notification Templates task to bulk assign notification templates to the records you define. Email notifications are a critical tool for tracking requirements to completion, and intervening when events are missed or overdue. See Bulk Assigning Notification Templates to Programs or Requirements.
• Add documents and communications log for single compliance records. Documents and communication logs document your compliance activity and help create a complete audit trail when needed. Because these documents are typically unique to the program or requirement, you add these to individual records rather than bulk assign them. However, you can store documents that do not pertain to a specific record in a document library folder system. See Managing the Document Library. For details on adding documents and communications logs, see Adding Communications Logs for Compliance Records, and Adding Documents for Compliance Records.

You can also add regulations, compliance programs, and requirements from the following tasks that enable you to add associated information for the record without switching tasks. When working from these task, you can add the record and also add documents, communications logs, notification templates, and locations from the same view. This information is added to the single record you are working on. This can be the simplest way to add compliance records when you have associated information to add and do not have a large number of records to add at one time.

• Manage Regulations and Initiatives
• Manage Compliance Programs
• Manage Compliance Requirements

Compliance Program Information Is Copied to New Requirements

Often, information you enter for compliance programs will also be applicable to the program's requirements. For this reason, for new requirement records, when you select the Compliance Program Code, the following fields entered for the selected program are copied to the Define Requirement form if they are empty:

• Responsible Person
• Vendor Code
• Regulatory Contact
• Compliance Priority (copied to Requirement Priority)

Entering this information at the compliance program level reduces data entry when the requirement's information is the same as the program's.

Adding Locations and Notifications

When you add notification templates for a compliance program (contract), this information is also used for the program's requirements (contract terms). Making notification template assignments at the program level can be the most efficient way to add this information if you handle most requirements for the program in a similar way. Then, for those requirements that require different handling, you can change the notification template assignments as needed.

When you add locations for a compliance requirement, this information is also used for the requirement’s program in reports and filters. In other words, for reports and filters, a program inherits all of the locations assigned to its requirements. Therefore, it is not necessary to assign locations to programs directly if you are tracking locations for requirements, unless you wish to track Compliance Level and Responsible Person by program location.

Data Entry Tools: Copy as New and Save and Add New

The following features enable you to efficiently enter new records:

• Copy As New including copying child records: Use Copy As New to add a new record that is similar to an existing record. Select a record, and click Copy As New. The application presents a new pane that contains all the values entered for the selected record except for the Primary Code field that is left blank for the new record. After saving the record with the new primary key, a form appears from which you select the child records that you want to copy to the new record, and the number of days by which to advance dates for the new record. For example, you can copy a compliance program to a new record along with all of its requirements, or you can copy a regulation along with all of its programs and requirements to a new regulation record. This is an efficient way to enter new regulations, programs, requirements, or notification templates that contain many of the same values as an existing record. See Copying Regulations and Programs Including Child Records.
• Save and Add New: When entering a series of new records, this command is an efficient way to start the next record. After entering information for a new record, click Save and Add New so that the application saves your entries and the pane refreshes, clearing the values so that you can enter another record.

Selecting Hierarchical Data

Much of the data you enter in forms, such as geographic, location, and regulation/compliance program/requirement data is hierarchical. When you select data from Select Value lists, in general, make your first selections lower in the hierarchy. Information higher in the hierarchy will then be filled in for you. For example, if you select a requirement, its program and regulation will automatically be entered in the form. If the Select Value list has many entries, as it will when selecting events, use the Smart Search console to limit the list. See Using the Smart Search Console.