6 Essential Features for Compliance Monitoring and Testing

Compliance monitoring and testing is essential for any organization that wants to ensure that its compliance framework is performing at peak effectiveness. Carrying out tests and monitoring results is a complicated task that organizations often struggle to manage efficiently. Following are 6 compliance monitoring and testing functionalities that a centralized compliance solution delivers. Each of these features automates or eliminates inefficient manual processes.

Automated scheduling

Manually keeping track of compliance monitoring and testing scheduling increases the risk exposure of the organization. Human error is inevitable and can result in missed activities and deadlines when manual monitoring is the primary method of creating and managing schedules.

Automating scheduling using calendars and task assignment with automated notifications ensures that all tests are carried out according to the schedule. With automated notifications, assigned stakeholders are notified by the system if a test is supposed to be carried out. Thus, even if there is lapse due to human error, the system will catch the delay and immediately notify assigned stakeholders.

Mapping

One key aspects of compliance monitoring that manual methods struggle to manage effectively is linking compliance tests with related regulations, documents, questionnaires, and reviews. Each of these articles is usually stored separately and needs to be fetched manually if someone wants to dive into the details of a test. Compliance monitoring and testing solutions link each test to the relevant regulations, documents, and all other related information. This allows management to access everything that pertains to a test in just a few clicks.

Data Collection

Collecting all the data from separate sources for the tests, and then collecting all the data from the separate tests to create an organization-wide report takes a significant amount of time and effort using legacy methods. Compliance managers need to manually sift through audit reports, test reports, documentation, notes, and much more to collect the data that they need. That data then needs to be standardized before it can be analyzed. The data collection tools available in compliance monitoring and testing solutions automatically capture the relevant information. Instead of having to collect the data, the compliance managers can view all the important information from an executive dashboard.

Streamlined reviews and approvals

The review and approval processes become needlessly complicated because all the communication needs to be done via emails. Compliance monitoring and testing tools automate the process. Once a test is available for review the notification instantly goes out to the person that needs to approve it. Once the approval is given, the person waiting for the approval is immediately notified. This minimizes the delay in the process.

Real-time visibility

Ensuring that each activity in the compliance monitoring and testing process is being carried out correctly and on time is the responsibility of the compliance managers. The problem is that they often have little to no visibility into these activities. They get the reports once the tests have been completed. Compliance monitoring and testing solutions deliver real-time visibility into each activity. Managers can see when each activity was started and what milestones have been reached in each activity. They can see if there is any delay and intervene to resolve quickly.

This real-time visibility also exists for compliance test results. If a compliance test fails, the result will be visible to everyone in the organization that has been given access to the compliance dashboard. This eliminates the need to manually escalate issues and problems – they are always visible so the organization can investigate and fix the issues as quickly as possible.

Instant reporting

A primary advantage of using a centralized solution for all compliance tests and monitoring processes is that all the data is present in a single, centralized system. Manually creating reports by collecting all the information takes significant effort and time, which means that by the time the report is generated it is often already outdated. Since all the information is present in one system if a testing solution is being used, reports can be generated instantly with just a few clicks. Organizations can add templates and the system automatically populates the templates with the latest information.

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Evolving the way compliance testing is managed

When all these features are brought together, they create a paradigm shift in the way compliance is handled in an organization. Instead of being a slow and cumbersome process, everything becomes streamlined and there is instantaneous visibility into real-time results and progress across the organization. This increases the efficiency and productivity of the compliance team exponentially and increases productivity by automating the manual parts of the job, enabling them to focus on the big picture and improve compliance levels.

Want to see how such a solution will work in your organization? Get in touch with our compliance experts for a demo.