Policy Creation Using Compliance Track
Compliance Track provides a fully featured web based policy and procedure management software as a key component.
It automates the entire life cycle on policy management, governance, and compliance. Policy creation and updation at the right time is important to keep the controls effective. Compliance Track provide the necessary workflows to manage the policy creation whether it is done inhouse or by a compliance consultant.
» Is this the right solution for you? Some sample usage scenarios.
1 You currently have printed employee handbooks and procedure manuals, you have difficulty in making sure that everyone has the right version.
2 You are from a regulated industry, you need to be sure that you have policies related to various rules applicable and you want to see the overlapping areas of compliance.
3 You want to link training/e-learning to your policies and procedures to make sure that everyone has similar understanding.
4 Your policies are drafted by external compliance consultants or lawyers as per regulations and everyone creates policies in their own way, it is becoming difficult to get a standard.
5 You are using SharePoint or similar collaborative solutions to manage document creation cycles and want to add policy management and compliance monitoring features.
6 You are looking to implement a GRC framework. You are considering your approach to policy management.
» What Are The Benefits Of Using Compliance Track For Policy Creation?
Policy Standards
Ensure your policies and procedures follow a standard irrespective of the author –either an employee or an external consultant.
Saves time involved in ensuring policy standards.
- Consistent and clear policies for end users
- Cost savings by reducing time and training effort to mandate policy standards
Policy Search
Gives a taxonomy framework for policies to be easily findable.
Saves time involved in finding the right policy or procedure for the relevant task.
- The "problem of finding" is addressed at the authoring stage without the need for authors to worry about the technical complexities
- Cost savings by having the right information at the right time
Policy Creation
Tools to integrate your existing policies in other formats, Gives a customisable workflow for policy creation.
Reduces review and approval time.
- Automate and expedite approval and review
- Visibility for validity and freshness of policies and procedures
- Visibility of policy versions and changes
Policy Archive
Standardise archival of policies by manual or automatic action.
Saves time in removing outdated policies, reminders for creating new versions etc.
- No more outdated policies and procedure manual – ensure the live content is always up-to-date
- Policy archive is kept for audit trails ensuring compliance
- Productivity by automating reminders for renewing policy documents
Policy Training
Consolidate your policy and procedure training programs in one place or even link with existing third party e-learning.
Save costs by capturing e-learning content, re-training for content knowledge.
- Policy training content is disseminated automatically with policies to ensure consistent understanding
- Important policies could be sent along with quizzes and ensures consistent performance from employees on key risk areas
» Policy Creation using Compliance Track - FAQ
| What are the features supported by Compliance Track for creating policies? |
Following is a summary of features during policy creation; 1. Create a policy name and assigning to a rule or other category. 2. Adding clauses to build up the policy. 3. Assigning to staff. 4. Selecting the affirmation schedule (if any) and future go schedule for publishing. 5. Selecting the Approver & sending for approval. 6. Approval and publishing. During the policy creation, the author of the policy can select an approver for the policy. Compliance Track lists all the users of the system in the drop down list to select an approver. It is the responsibility of the policy creator to select the appropriate approver. If there are no approvers, the author can select himself as the approver. The selected approver then gets an email with a content as per the notification template. When the approver logs on to Compliance Track, he will see the list of policies waiting for his approval.
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| What is the benefit of using the import functionality in Compliance Track to import policy documents? |
Policies or Procedures of a company are often drafted in MS Word. These contain clauses which document the controls to mitigate specific risks. It also contain actions by the company to address specific rules mandated by rulebooks by regulators or standard industry practices. As a Word document, the data related to such mapping is not easy to visualise or to find gap areas. Using the import functionality, the unstructured data contained in these documents can be converted to structured data and visual mapping to rules/controls/risks/compliance tests can be easily done. |
| What are the user considerations while importing documents to Compliance Track? |
Normally, tje users create a document in MS Word using the standard Word Styles. Compliance Track recognises the structure and presents the clauses as per the structure. If your document does not follow any style or structure (for example, even the headings are using Body Text ), Compliance Track cannot recognise the clauses. If in doubt, you can freely test the import functionality and see the results or contact support@compliancetrack.com for clarification. |
| How do you create Policies in Compliance Track? |
Clicking on "Create a New Policy" link will display the policy creation screen. Any policy, procedure, manual or other documentation can be created using this facility.
First step in creating a policy is to enter the basic details of the Policy in the Policy Tab.
Following are the fields in this page. Status – the current status of the policy, one of 3 levels are displayed – draft, awaiting approval, and approved. Category – the category assigned during the policy creation process. Name – the policy name. Clicking on a policy name will allow you to view the policy detail screen. The navigation at the top of this screen will show; Author – the creator of the policy Approver – Approver can be the author himself, but CT will follow the workflow for the approval action to complete. The approver will receive an email as specified in the template notifying that there is a policy to approve. Keywords – This is to augment the search efficiency. Date Created Date Expires - One can specify the date of expiry of this policy. For example, some policies need to be amended on a periodic basis (such as an Anti Money Laundering Policy). It is possible to set the date of expirty and a notification schedule for updating the policy if needed. Date Approved Content – This is not a mandatory field and it is used if you wish to enter relevant details of a policy. This may not be used if you are creating your policy as a set of clauses. However, this field gives the flexibility for the policy creator to define his content in the way he wants. Second step in creating a policy is to add clauses (if any) for the policy.
Following are the fields in this page.
Policy – this is pre-filled based on the policy from which you entered the clause creation. Name – name of the clause. Level – The level sets the level or depth of a clause. Using this field, you can have several levels of sub clauses. Content – enter the contents of the clause. Third step in creating a policy is to set the affirmation schedule (if any) for the policy. This is the frequency at which a particular policy needs to be re-affirmed by staff, for example quarterly PA Dealing declarations.
Following are the fields in this page. Affirmation Completion Deadline Affirmation Schedule Affirmation Text Fourth step in creating a policy is to set the users of the policy.
In this tab, you get the option to select the Business Unit, Department or Users to whom this policy is applicable. Fifth step in creating a policy is to send the policy for approval by clicking Send for Approval button.
If you wish to send for approval at a later stage, you can save the policy and it will be visible in your Setup Policy tab in the "draft" state. If you click the "Send for Approval" button, the policy will be changed to "Awaiting Approval" state and the approver will get an email based on the mail template. When the approver logs into Compliance Track, he can approve the policy by clicking on "Approve" button. |
| How do you assign policies to users during policy creation? |
A policy creator can assign policies to a user during policy creation or a System Administrator can assign policies to a user anytime.
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| How do you assign more users to a policy after it is approved? |
Once a policy is approved, it is not possible to change or assign users to that policy from the Policy Assignment tab in Policy Management. This enforcement gives the approver a level of certainty that at the time of approval policy assignment is also up-to-date. However, you can add users or departments for Policies from the Setup page with System Administrator privileges.
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| Who can setup Policies? |
Users with Creator or System Administrator privileges can initiate policy creation in Compliance Track.
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