Companies’ need for regulatory intelligence
Among the many tasks of the “HSE Manager” function, there are those concerning regulatory monitoring and ensuring the company’s compliance with the various regulatory requirements.
On the subject of regulations, the main needs of HSE managers are as follows:
- know the regulations, follow their evolution and anticipate future changes
- distinguish which regulations apply to your company and its activities
- understand in detail the requirements of these texts and their implications for the company’s activities
- implement corrective measures and monitor their progress and site compliance.
The essential features of a good regulatory watch and compliance tool
- Centralize regulations: keep all applicable regulations in one place, with clear classification and searches by keyword or date.
- Automatic updates of relevant regulatory changes applicable to the company.
- Online help: internal chat, email, telephone
- Action plan automation
- Real-time monitoring of compliance actions
- Indicators and consolidation by site or group of sites (country)
- Customization (alerts, view levels, etc.)
Choose a free regulatory monitoring and compliance tool
To be honest, we haven’t found a regulatory monitoring and compliance tool or software package that’s completely free.
Free or inexpensive tools offer functionalities, of course, but certainly more in terms of regulatory monitoring than compliance. In particular, they help raise awareness of regulations and monitor the general, but non-targeted, flow of regulations.
[At Novallia, we offer a basic range of generalist regulatory watch bulletins, keeping you up to date with environmental, energy and occupational health & safety regulations on a monthly basis for French and European rights, and quarterly for other countries].
Of course, free tools also have many limitations.
Including :
- updates that are too far apart– sometimes 6 months, as opposed to a maximum of 2 weeks for NV Compliance – which means the company is unable to anticipate changes.
- no filtering of texts applicable to the company. And finding the applicable texts in all the texts is a major task.
- no follow-up and online help included in the price
- inability to export and import Excel files
- a lack of overview and consolidation
- no customization or parameterization possible
It’s tempting to turn to a free or low-cost monitoring and compliance tool. This may be a solution for small businesses with a very limited risk profile, but it’s clear that these tools will be limited in terms of functionality and support.
We’ve been developing our own applications for 12 years, combining the expertise of engineers & legal experts in the field and regulations with a high-performance SaaS application featuring many indispensable functions. This combination of expertise and development has a cost, but it also saves HSE managers an enormous amount of time and efficiency, and therefore money for companies!
It should be noted that the cost of digitizing this process pays for itself in just a few months.