Timely and thorough process compliance can be the difference between effective operations, bottlenecks and potentially even huge fines. There are ways to ensure that your organisation is always on track to meet every compliance requirement, every time.
Why is Process Compliance Important?
One of the foundations of building a successful business is deploying and overseeing effective processes. However, you may have created the best processes with the best documentation implementing the best technology but it is all for nothing if you cannot actually get your team to consistently perform the aspects of it that require manual intervention.
This becomes even more of an issue when an organisation is bound by regulatory requirements. Human error can potentially end up resulting in costly fines as well as other potential penalties. Failure to comply with a process can either be complete failure to comply or simply failure to comply within an expected time window, which in many scenarios can be just as much of a problem. Investing in process compliance is an important form of risk mitigation for companies of all types. There are also situations, such as not following up on a lead, in which poor process compliance may not necessarily have direct deleterious effects, but still represents potentially lost revenue for a business.
People are not automata and can not be expected to act as such, but with good training and the right systems there are ways to significantly minimise the possibility that process compliance infringements will occur.
Why do Process Compliance Issues Occur?
Simple human shortcomings aside, there are a number of factors within workflows that can exacerbate the possibility that process compliance issues will occur. One of these is a rigid workflow with baked-in system constraints. Unadaptable, brittle systems might face difficulties in implementing process compliance. Attempting to implement process compliance in a rigidly automated workflow without the necessary technical skills can lead to errors and downtime.
Another reason why process compliance might be challenging is a workflow being spread across numerous different systems and departments. Handovers can be complex procedures and are often done in a Chinese Room style manner where a certain amount of simplification is necessary. This means that confirming and following up on whether certain conditions have been met is more difficult, especially since responsibility for it is more difficult to distribute between two disparate teams.
Finally, the sheer size of a project or organisation may hamper the possibility of process compliance. If it is not implemented in an effective way, steps involving compliance can add an additional layer of work on top of the actual project work which may be neglected in a crunch or treated as an afterthought by a team.
A scenario for a business which represents a complex process compliance environment is processing sales leads, writing documentation and handing them over. These are typically coming in through multiple channels and systems with varying levels of quality and completeness. Even if they are consolidated in a CRM system, not prioritising and following up on leads often leads to lost opportunities.
What can Help with Process Compliance?
There are a number of steps that can be taken in order to assist your team in process compliance. Building a library of business rules organised subject area is important in having a comprehensive view of every step in the workflow and have it be centralised for easy access. Furthermore, a notification framework is important in order to ensure steps are followed through. Automatic notifications which are tied to designated triggers are an almost foolproof way to ensure accountability and help ensure that no manual task slips through the cracks, no matter how minor. Finally, a way to capture feedback is important in order to track that actions have been taken and a way to ensure important supplementary context is stored, that may not otherwise be able to be recorded elsewhere.
How Loome Can Help
Loome offers an enterprise-level software solution which helps in every one of these aspects of process compliance. Easily configurable business alerts that deliver notifications across a range of platforms, operating across an integration of all your operational systems and visualised all in one place within an analytics portal. Contact Us today to find out more about how Loome can help with process compliance.
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