Support Compliance with Document Management
Compliance is such an incredibly complicated issue. It spans across industries, locations, departments and roles. And, it’s a moving target. Rules and regulations change and evolve over time. But what’s the one thing that touches pretty much every kind of compliance – from SOX to ISO to HIPAA? Documents.
Nearly every kind of compliance has some type of documentation around it that must be recorded and retained. Plus, many must also follow specific processes and documented procedures. When an organization tries to manage compliance documents with file folders, email or network shares, they often regret it at audit time. Employees spend hours, days, even weeks, finding the documents requested and proving processes were followed.
Even worse, you might not be able to prove processes were followed, find incomplete files before they’re a problem, or locate requested documents and you end up facing fines, legal repercussions or de-certification.
That doesn’t have to be the case. You can make your document-based processes and documentation retention more compliance-friendly, ease the burden on employees and help avoid the consequences of an audit gone bad.
Take the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority (CHFA). It has to meet compliance for both government and financial regulatory bodies. With single files that have thousands of pages and retention periods of up to 60 years, paper wasn’t a viable option.
“OnBase helps us sort and organize content faster. We don’t have to worry about losing a document before its retention period is up,” says Brian Mueller, ECM Program Manager at CHFA. “If we ever need to produce it, we won’t waste time digging through old file boxes for it. We can find it with a quick search in OnBase.”
Confirm your Organization Followed Processes and has Needed Documentation
With an enterprise content management (ECM) solution like OnBase, organizations record every action and step in document processes with audit trails and document histories. A simple mouse-click shows when each user did what action and when, and you can prove that processes were followed as documented.
With a quick look in a virtual folder or an exceptions report in OnBase, you can also make sure that each file has every required document. For example, Human Resources could find out which employees are missing a W-2 in seconds.
Not only that, but keeping documents for the right amount of time is often very tedious and burdensome for organizations. With documents coming in daily, monthly or yearly and each type requiring a different retention period ranging anywhere from 24 hours to forever, it quickly becomes exceptionally complicated to do manually. More often than not, it’s not done at all and documents are kept forever or until space becomes such a commodity that an organization conducts a mass purge. Not only is it extremely expensive to store these documents, but it opens your organization up to unnecessary risk.
With documents in OnBase, your organization can automate the retention and records management process. After a simple set-up to define retention periods, documents can automatically be purged when the its lifecycle expires or they can be routed for review before deletion.
By easing these parts of compliance, organizations facing audits – whether for financial (SOX, Frank-Dodd, PCI), operational (ISO, policies and procedures, continuous improvement initiatives) or regulatory (FDA, USDA, FERPA, HIPAA, 21CFR Part 11) audits – will conduct them more accurately and with less burden on employees.