Compliance Application: Overview

The Compliance application provides a comprehensive solution to the task of monitoring your regulatory activity. The application enables you to track your regulations, compliance programs, and requirements for both regulatory requirements and internal initiatives. Contracts for outsourced work that is required to meet compliance regulations can also be modeled as regulations, compliance programs (contracts), and requirements (contract terms). Thus, you can manage both the compliance programs as well as contracted work to meet these requirements using the Compliance features. You can model all contracts for outsourced work: those that are tied to regulations, and those that are not.

Once you have developed this basic inventory of compliance programs and requirements (including contracts and contract terms), you can implement additional features, such as attaching documents, adding communications logs, defining notification templates to notify stakeholders at key points in the compliance process. This repository of information can be used to establish an audit trail when it is needed, and helps you to evaluate which requirements and locations put the organization most at risk for noncompliance. These features are optional, so after developing the basic requirements and contract terms, you can add data incrementally. The Compliance application is not intended to enforce any specific workflow; once you have developed information for regulations, compliance programs and contracts, and requirements and contract terms, you can add the additional features in any order that your organization wants to follow.

For both contract terms and requirements, you can inspect the various areas of your facility to verify that work has been properly completed and that you are in compliance with regulations. You first develop a series of questionnaires that field inspectors must answer during the inspection. Next, field auditors periodically visit the areas and respond to the questionnaires using either Web Central running on a tablet or laptop or the Archibus Compliance Surveys mobile app.

Concepts

General

Compliance and Maintenance

Events

Surveys

Procedure

The following is a typical workflow for getting started with the Compliance application

  1. Business Process Owners develop:
    • facility background data, if this data has not already been developed using another application. Developing this data is optional, but having facility data enables you to track regulations, compliance programs, requirements and their events by locations, such as geographic location, or site/property/building location. You can even specify the employee, equipment, or equipment standard as the location for a requirement. See Defining Background Data for your Facility.
    • compliance-related background data, such as compliance levels, regulation rank, compliance priority, regulation categories and types, regulatory contacts, and program categories and types. Entering background data for the Compliance application is optional, but is required to generate certain reports, or to send email notifications to stakeholders when critical event dates occur. See Defining Background Data for Compliance.
    • VAT and multicurrency data, if needed. The cost reports support the Enhanced Global Feature Set (multicurrency and VAT). If you have a multinational organization and want to take advantage of this feature, you must develop the appropriate background data. See Working with the Enhanced Global Feature Set.
  2. Compliance Project Managers develop:
    • additional background data, including contacts, vendors, employees, and companies (the regulatory agencies with which you work).
    • projects, if you are organizing your compliance programs into projects.
  3. Compliance Program Managers:
    • enter regulations, compliance programs, and requirements
    • generate scheduled events
    • add documents, communications logs, locations, violations, and notification templates (optional)
    • link preventive maintenance procedures to compliance requirements and events, or create work requests for on demand work.
    • manage all aspects of the events for which they are entered as the Responsible Person for the event's compliance program or requirement.
  4. Contract Managers model contracts and contract terms (using the same tables as compliance programs and requirements). They can then follow step 3, above, to manage them.
  5. Contract Managers and Compliance Program Managers develop questionnaires that field personnel can use to report on conditions in the field. Questionnaires provide an independent and objective means of measuring the outcomes of compliance programs against the strictures defined in regulations, contracts, and the organization's policies.
  6. Field personnel use the Compliance Survey mobile app or Web Central running on a laptop or tablet to perform assessment surveys. The mobile app and Web Central present the questionnaires designed by the contract managers and compliance program managers, above. Field personnel can inspect items to be sure that:
    • items are in compliance with regulations
    • contracted vendors have performed required work.

    Based on responses to the survey, you can generate work requests to address items or automatically change an item's compliance level.

  7. Contract Managers and Compliance Program Managers review reports: