Environmental & Risk Management / Compliance Management / Getting Started

Getting Started with Compliance Management: Overview

The Compliance Management application enables you to enter data for the regulations, compliance programs, and regulatory requirements that form the basis of your compliance activity. Once you have entered this basic information, you can use it to schedule and track events, which are the specific occurrences of a requirement that you can track to completion. You can then supplement this basic information by adding location information, documents, communications logs, notification templates and violations.

The application enables you to enter a great deal of information, and provides ways of simplifying this process. (See Best Practices for Developing Compliance Data.) However, you might want to get started incrementally, beginning with an inventory of your regulations, compliance programs, and requirements, and then developing the additional data to use more features as needed.

The following Getting Started topics describe how to get started using different features of the Compliance Management application. Use it as a starting point to assess the features you want to use. You can also refer to Business Process Owner - Compliance for information to help you decide the Background data you might want to develop.

The following sections describe the process for implementing Compliance Management incrementally:

Regulations, compliance programs, and requirements - Develop a basic inventory of your regulatory requirements. See Tracking Regulations, compliance programs and requirements
- Scheduling requirements. You can use the application to generate events from your requirements using the recurring schedule you enter. See Scheduling Recurring Compliance Requirements (Events)
- Update events- Update event information, including event status, and add non-recurring (ad hoc) events as needed. See Managing Events (Recurring Compliance Requirements)
Managing Notifications - If your compliance efforts involve multiple stakeholders, communication can be a critical factor. For this reason, the application enables you to automate email notifications by defining notification templates that can be flexibly assigned to compliance programs, requirements, or events, or universally applied to all programs and requirements. See Getting Started: Using Notification Templates
Using the Document Library - You can store documents with your regulations, compliance programs, requirements, locations, and events using the Document Library feature. These documents help establish an audit trail that can be easily accessed when needed. See Tracking and Managing All Compliance Documentation in the Document Library
Add location information - You can store multiple locations to help you to manage your programs and requirements by location, enabling you to analyze where your compliance issues are occurring. See Track and Manage Compliance Locations
Add information for violations - Track violations, including their severity and cost, by regulation, compliance program, or requirement. See Track Compliance Violations.
Add communications logs - Communication logs provide another method of enhancing communication about compliance activity, and creating a detailed and complete audit trail of all compliance activities to help mitigate risk. You can add communications logs for regulations, compliance program, requirements, events, or locations. See Track All Compliance-Related Communications (Communications Logs).
Managing your compliance events - The Compliance Program Coordinator can track the requirements and events for which they are entered as the Responsible Person. See Managing Your Compliance Events (Compliance Program Coordinator)
Using all views - After supplementing your basic inventory of regulations, compliance programs, and requirements with documents, communications logs, locations, and notification templates, you will be able to work with this data using any task. See Advanced Compliance Management