By Thomas Schneck
How well documented are your company’s compliance processes? How clear is your audit trail history? If faced with auditor inquiries, would you be able to prove what document rules were in place at the time any document was accessed?
If you haven’t considered how enterprise content management software improves your ability to streamline sensitive document workflows and simplify compliance concerns, you need to take a look at how ECM software increases process efficiency and reduces the risk – and costs – associated with compliance.
Compliance Hurdles Easily Removed By ECM Software
Various activities need to be performed when it comes to ensuring compliance standards for certain documents. For some companies, the steps below are seen as hurdles, but by using the right document management software, these hurdles become efficiencies:
- Searching for and retrieving appropriate documentation when asked by auditors
- Proving the full lineage of a document and changes throughout the document lifecycle
- Demonstrating a controlled document process and its exceptions based on preexisting rules
The Benefits Of Using ECM For Compliance
The more regulated the industry, the stricter the compliance requirements. Whether dealing with tax returns, W2 forms, brokerage statements, insurance policies or medical records, sensitive information needs to have controlled access throughout the entirety of the lifecycle.
A document management process through ECM uses templates and digital workflows to streamline and simplify the creation, review and approval of document types.
The benefit of ECM related to regulatory compliance is the software’s ability to work with different silos of information and integrate these documents into a single consistent, efficient repository. Instead of you having to scour through a multitude of filing cabinets or boxes of documents, the software features an easy-to-use document index to search for documents and answer the key compliance concern: who did what to which document and when?
ECM takes audit trail control functionality to a whole new level.
The Role Of Audit Trails In Your Organization
Handling sensitive documents the right way is important for businesses of all kinds, and an electronic audit control can help with:
- Monitoring overall system and individual document security
- Tracking document access by user and time of day, week or month
- Recording employee activity in terms of the documents they access and retrieve
- Automating the requirement of specific reasons for printing or electronically sending documents between departments and employees
The Key To Ensuring Regulatory Compliance With ECM Software
The biggest task when implementing enterprise content management is ensuring your technology is synchronized with your standard operating procedures. Rather than expose you to risk, your ECM system should make meeting compliance requirements easier than ever.
The most overlooked feature of choosing the right software is ensuring control of that document once it leaves the document management system and is consumed by another application. How does your chosen ECM system collaborate with other third-party applications to maintain the security and integrity of all regulated documents? Does your software easily accommodate the changing rules of compliance regulations?
Answering these kinds of questions is critical to selecting the right software.
To find out how a customized ECM solution can benefit your business, give KeeFORCE a call today at (270) 366-0553.
