Whether you work in retail, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, or another industry, your business must follow government regulations if you want to avoid costly fines, penalties, and reputation damage in your market.
And depending on your industry, you may even be faced with consumer protection standards, data safety regulations like the EU’s GDPR, or even industry-specific codes like the healthcare industry’s HIPAA.
Larger companies have complicated workflows that involve dozens—even hundreds of employees at a time. How can you ensure that every single internal policy aligns with compliance requirements, especially as your business grows? The answer is a compliance management system (CMS), a formal and streamlined approach for businesses to adhere to laws and reduce the risk of non-compliance.
Read on to learn more about how a typical CMS is designed, maintained, and run in a modern organization.
What Makes Up a Compliance Management System?
A popular focal point for business administrators, risk management comes in many “flavors,” like financial risk and cybersecurity risk management. So it’s no surprise that regulatory compliance is another essential piece of the puzzle.
A CMS is a unified system of business policies that help staff members manage compliance and stay aware of the industry’s regulations. A proper compliance management program reduces risk and lowers the chance of costly fines and sanctions, ultimately paying for itself in the long-run.
The critical components of effective compliance risk management are:
- Employee training: How well your company adheres to laws hinges largely on how well the employees can stay compliant. Compliance training programs are a must for this reason, as they cover new emerging policies and the associated new procedures the firm is undertaking. Keep everyone on the same page, and you minimize the number of mistakes.
- New policies: Laws aren’t static; they change over time. To keep the business up-to-date, management must reissue documentation to employees describing new procedures and goals to look out for. These documents are vital to risk management and must be updated regularly to reflect new organizational policies.
- Monitoring progress: How do you know your efforts are working properly? A compliance monitoring program identifies potential problems and gaps in your procedures, ensuring infractions never come up.
Implementation of a compliance management system differs depending on the needs and circumstances of your firm.
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What Can You Do to Make a Compliance Management System Successful?
It’s clearly important to get regulatory compliance management done right, so let’s talk about some best practices for designing a program for your business, whether you need a cybersecurity compliance framework or one that’s specific to manufacturing regulations.
Have Specialized Managers At the Helm
A board of directors is usually responsible for the implementation of a CMS, but the task can also go to a dedicated compliance officer as well. Regardless, whoever you have at the wheel must have proper access into your internal operations so that review of your compliance policies is possible without much friction.
In addition to producing guidelines and keeping everything up-to-date with current laws, compliance managers are also responsible for running regular compliance audits.
Run Compliance Audits Regularly
Auditing involves the assessment of your CMS program by an independent third-party entity (sometimes a governmental body) to check on its effectiveness. You might be graded on:
- Adherence to your own CMS
- Your risk management performance
- Your ability to update your policies with changing regulations
- How you respond to consumer complaints
Consumers might submit concerns not only directly to your company but also to the FTC and other regulatory agencies. Failure to monitor and respond to those complaints can lead to legal action, as well as frustration from clients. In fact, you might win potential buyers over if you provide fast feedback.
An audit report sent to the board of directors will detail exactly what was searched, which may include any number of products, services, or organizational departments. It will also offer suggested improvements and corrective actions that the company might take.
Take Advantage of Automated Compliance Management
Administrators have always been looking for ways to make a compliance management system cheaper and easier to implement without sacrificing accuracy and effectiveness. Those needs are the reason why CentralEyes believes that compliance management system software is the future of enterprise-grade risk management.
Automating the usual security and compliance tasks through an integrated platform makes management incredibly seamless thanks to a compliance dashboard management system. This way, you can see risks in one convenient interface and respond to them quickly before they cause problems.
Turn Compliance Into a Competitive Advantage for Your Business
The rapid digitization of virtually every industry has made compliance a mission-critical area for most businesses today. Add to that the tangible and intangible costs of compliance violations, and it’s clear why compliance management systems are a must-have.
Centraleyes takes a comprehensive approach to consolidating all your compliance needs into one solution that can be customized to work in any industry, from finance to healthcare.
Are you looking to implement a compliance management system that’s driven by best practices? Book a demo with one of our cybersecurity compliance specialists today to learn more.
Start Getting Value With
Centraleyes for Free
See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days
