Leveraging Compliance to Drive Company-wide Business Efficiencies
From the Sarbanes-Oxley and USA PATRIOT Acts to US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals and US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, government is increasingly legislating how companies run their businesses. Complying with a broad spectrum of mandates can often be an overwhelming task companies simply want to "make it through." Instead, organizations should look beyond merely surviving compliance and use it as a driver to improve company-wide business efficiencies.
While every regulation is unique and involves specific requirements, there are fundamental information technology (IT) capabilities and business processes that can be instituted to not only support each initial compliance initiative, but also generate cost savings and significant business efficiencies well into the future.
Building an Enterprise-wide Compliance Framework
The first step toward driving business efficiency through compliance processes is building an enterprise-wide compliance framework to tackle all relevant mandates. This framework compels organizations to inventory, align, develop and manage compliance content, processes and controls in a consistent and efficient fashion. As a result, companies save money, avoid operations headaches, optimize resources and implement a strong policy regarding ethical business practices. An effective and comprehensive compliance framework should help an organization achieve the following objectives:
1. Support the overall compliance initiative along with individual or departmental compliance efforts;
2. Manage all compliance information in a centralized, enterprise-wide solution, while eliminating project-level silos of content;
3. Utilize the same business processes and information to support multiple compliance efforts;
4. Reduce risk by automating compliance processes and providing visibility into the results of those processes;
5. Mature its controls environment by automating controls through a business process management infrastructure;
6. Minimize the costs of legal discovery in the event of litigation or a legal investigation;
7. Avoid fines for violating laws and regulations;
8. Proactively manage emerging compliance requirements;
9. Migrate toward an enterprise risk management (ERM) environment; and
10. Ultimately create a competitive advantage and increased value for shareholders, customers and employees.
There are three primary components of a compliance framework that will help companies attain these objectives: people, process and technology. Companies must determine their organizational structures (i.e. which staff members report to what employees), and define their compliance processes for activities such as documentation, testing, remediation and reporting. Organizations should work with their audit or risk-management consulting firms to complete these tasks. And finally, companies must implement a technology architecture to help drive and support sustainable compliance processes.
Compliance From Content Management
After an organization has defined its overall compliance approach and methodology, a technology architecture can then be created. Regardless of the regulatory requirements a company faces, there are certain fundamental, technology-based activities it will need to perform in order to best optimize compliance processes and business efficiencies.
These include:
1. Creating a framework for creating, sharing and distributing various types of compliance-related content, including e-mail and instant messaging;
2. Establishing a comprehensive approach for document retention and records management;
3. Developing an enterprise-wide security architecture to ensure only authorized individuals access certain compliance content;
4. Optimizing controls so they become part of business processes and are executed predictably and repeatedly;
5. Determining the scope of testing, including what types of control testing must be performed and which results must be tracked;
6. Automating compliance activities, such as self-assessment, testing and design review;
7. Keeping audit trails of the changes made to documentation;
8. Instituting a process to accommodate the needs of company executives and the compliance team for monitoring compliance and reporting activities or results; and
9. Identifying the potential requirements of new regulations.
Increasingly, companies are turning to enterprise content management (ECM) systems to support these activities and provide the technical capabilities necessary for optimizing compliance processes and business efficiencies.
Leveraging a Unified Compliance Platform to Increase Efficiencies
Companies can best drive company-wide business efficiencies by leveraging a unified content management platform to support all compliance initiatives. Rather than using disparate products from multiple vendors to manage various types of compliance mandates and their associated content—which often results in unnecessarily complex implementations and high integration, support and maintenance costs—companies should implement an ECM suite with components that truly are unified, not simply integrated. A unified ECM architecture eliminates the issues described above and provides a single, standard platform and infrastructure for addressing a variety of compliance and content management needs across an enterprise.
An ECM architecture, such as Stellent Universal Content Management, provides the required functionality for compliance from one platform and eliminates the need for integrations between various ECM components. It can support any content management-based compliance application required by an organization. And, its unified architecture ensures all compliance applications can be deployed on the same platform, and specific components are interchangeable, extensible and complementary to each other. This single-architecture approach allows users to easily and efficiently access, share and leverage all content, applications, processes and content services from a common user interface.
Because an ECM suite reduces the number of separate applications needed for compliance, it decreases the total cost of ownership for organizations. And, by offering a single-user interface for business users and leveraging a common skill-set for administration across all compliance applications, an ECM suite minimizes training and administration costs.
Lastly, by improving business processes with consistent automatic routing and approval cycles and 24x7 self-service access to secured business content, ECM elevates efficiency and productivity across an enterprise. Overall, a unified compliance platform can help organizations turn compliance tasks into ongoing processes conveniently and transparently carried out during the normal course of business.
Stellent for Compliance
The Stellent® Universal Content Management™ suite provides a wide range of core technologies along with specific applications that have helped numerous companies across a variety of industries comply with government and regulatory mandates. Stellent technology enables organizations to address documentation and identification of key processes and controls as required by various regulations, and automates testing processes to ease ongoing resource requirements. Its key technology components for supporting compliance initiatives include:
- Stellent Document Management—enables organizations to securely capture, share and distribute digital and paper-based documents and reports. It automatically converts native content (e.g. spreadsheets, word processing documents, etc.) into Web-viewable formats that can be easily accessed via a browser by members of the compliance team, as well as any other authorized user. Stellent Document Management also facilitates quick and easy access to retention policies, escalation flows and audit trails for individuals sanctioned to see them. Additionally, the technology provides version-control features that allow companies to save previous drafts of content for archiving and rollback purposes. Full-text and metadata search capabilities empower users to quickly retrieve critical business information.
Stellent Document Management's business process management capabilities connect all enterprise systems to efficiently manage entire, end-to-end business processes—from accounts payable to journal entries to capital expense requests. The system automates discreet control procedures, such as quarter-closing activities, and automatically routes and manages transaction information, such as purchase orders, claims, invoices and applications. It also facilitates process modeling and documentation, activity monitoring, and auditing and reporting.
- Stellent Records Management—allows users to control the creation, declaration, classification, retention and destruction of active electronic and physical business records. The Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 Chapter 2- and Chapter 4-certified solution enables companies to easily classify any piece of content as a record by simply assigning it to an appropriate record category or folder. It also generates sophisticated reports related to retention schedules and file plans. In addition, users can seamlessly declare e-mails and e-mail attachments as records. And,Stellent Records Management utilizes a common interface to reinforce business-user awareness and responsibility that their content and e-mails are considered records.
- Stellent's workflow capabilities—provide periodic "check-ups" on the progress toward compliance goals by automating assessment, audit, remediation, approval and review processes. The workflow function automatically triggers and sends e-mail notifications to appropriate compliance team members when they must be alerted to a specific issue, a report is required, or a concern or process must be escalated, among other things.
- Stellent Digital Asset Management—helps companies quickly and easily access, manage, share, optimize and re-use corporate digital assets, such as training videos, conference call recordings, videoconferences and depositions.
Stellent also offers applications built to support specific regulations. For example, the Stellent Sarbanes-Oxley Solution is a COSO-based application that enables chief financial officers (CFOs) and compliance teams to quickly deploy an intuitive, Web-based solution to manage and track their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance processes. The solution automates long-term Sarbanes-Oxley compliance methodologies, enabling companies to efficiently manage, approve and access documentation, including disclosure controls documents, internal controls matrices, testing procedures and results, and remedial actions. It is highly personalized for non-technical business users, allowing auditors, accountants and CFOs to easily create, manage, share, track, approve and archive information with minimal training, using only a Web browser.
Stellent, Inc. is a global provider of content management software solutions that drive rapid success for customers by enabling fast implementations and generating quick, broad user adoption. With Stellent Universal Content Management, customers can easily deploy multiple line-of-business applications—such as compliance initiatives, public Web sites and secure intranets and extranets—and also scale the technology to support multi-site management and enterprise-wide content management needs.
More than 4,400 customers worldwide—including Procter & Gamble, Merrill Lynch, Los Angeles County, The Home Depot, British Red Cross, ING, Vodafone, Georgia Pacific, Bayer Corp., Coca-Cola FEMSA, Emerson Process Management and Genzyme Corp.—have selected Stellent solutions to power their content-centric business applications. Stellent is headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minn. and maintains offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.