How to Meet Compliance with Automation

Blog: ProcessMaker Blog

The number of new laws regarding compliance has increased in the last five years. These laws impact several sectors not limited to finance, education, insurance, healthcare, and more. These industries store and work with highly sensitive customer data that requires careful handling. Outdated workflows and manual processes are prone to human error, a potential security breach in today’s world. In order to meet these regulatory requirements, more companies are turning to automation technology for help.

In this article, we’ll explore how automation helps companies like yours meet compliance.

How can automation technology help your enterprise stay compliant?

Automated solutions like document management systems (DMS), robotic process automation (RPA), and business process management (BPM) help to implement a stronger compliance strategy within organizations.

DMS helps create, upload, store, and send documents with ease.

RPA relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate highly repetitive tasks normally performed by humans.

BPM is a method used by enterprises to optimize their core business processes, otherwise known as workflows. BPM can be deployed on-premises, as a software, through the cloud, or as a hybrid solution depending on the needs of the company.

Fortunately, there are comprehensive platforms that have hybrid options to replace or integrate easily with all of these technologies. The result is a more ethical and efficient enterprise with smoother business operations, strengthened data security, reduction of administrative costs, and zero penalty fees and legal repercussions.

Here are a few of the many capabilities the right hybrid, all-inclusive product can transform the way your enterprise addresses compliance:

User identification and authentication
Secured information in a centralized database
Restricted user access to tailor to different levels of security clearance
Role assignment based on job description
Real-time push notifications of action items
Error-tracking and easy auditing with reporting system

Due to the flexibility of this large enterprise solution, security protocol is greatly enhanced thanks to activity reports generated by automation software. These reports provide a macro view into the user’s activity, accounts, and responsibilities, indicating breaches and errors quickly as they happen.

Mitigate risk with automation technology

Granting stakeholders the same access to editing reports that make or break an audit can get out of control. Enforcing security around a manual process is next to impossible, yet several organizations still use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to store compliance-related data. For example, the tax industry has to comply with the government to report tax documents accurately. According to a 2018 report by Tiplati and Gatepoint Research, “30% of companies aren’t validating tax forms at all, while 45% are doing so manually.”

Entering data into a spreadsheet by multiple people is prone to human error. And slight mistakes can result in delayed financial aid for college or an incident like the Capital One security breach due to a lack of standardized, tight-knit operations. Failing to have proper processes, security measures, and central repositories in place can result in cyber attacks, information leaks, and legal action. More so, if your enterprise lacks the IT infrastructure to catch these mistakes in real-time, you could violate international, federal, and state regulations.

So how can your enterprise avoid risky situations using technology? The answer is adopting an automation solution into your enterprise IT strategy. By automating the flow of information between parties, data is transferred securely, quickly, and is guaranteed to meet ever-changing policy shifts.

Most enterprises today are using a multi-layer cloud strategy in their tech stacks. While the versatility and the strength of the cloud naturally produces more security, it is still up to the customer to check off permissions, especially if a hybrid cloud solution is used. Whatever happens in the cloud needs to transfer to the on-premises component, otherwise control and security is at stake.

The best practices for creating a compliant-ready enterprise

There are several ways to enable compliance on the organizational level. These are a few tried and true tips to help you implement a strong compliance strategy:

Send a link to the working document version for review, not the document itself, to confusion by limiting access to previous versions of a document.
Automate retention with automatic deletion or opt to send an email notification before hitting the Delete button.
Check document retention limits. Holding documents beyond their required retention period creates risk for non-compliance and privacy violations.
Move your documents to the cloud with the right platform. A trusted cloud provider on the enterprise level is Amazon Web Services, which meets a broad set of international and industry-specific compliance standards. The cloud also provides built-in security.

Compliance doesn’t have to be a burden. By leveraging automation technology through RPA, AI, DMS, and BPM software, your enterprise can operate with full integrity. The result is a stronger, systematized way of conducting business.

Don’t sacrifice business ethics, time, and money at the expense of failing to plan for regulatory changes. Never miss a deadline again with our intelligent BPM platform, available on-premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid solution. Learn more at www.processmaker.com.

About ProcessMaker:

ProcessMaker is low-code business process management and workflow software. ProcessMaker makes it easy for business analysts to collaborate with IT to automate complex business processes connecting people and existing company systems. Headquartered in Durham, North Carolina in the United States, ProcessMaker has a partner network spread across 35 countries on five continents. Hundreds of commercial customers, including many Fortune 100 companies, rely on ProcessMaker to digitally transform their core business processes enabling faster decision making, improved compliance, and better performance.

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