Regulatory compliance solved by Liferay & Valamis

How Liferay and Valamis solve regulatory compliance

Companies today are facing an increasing number of regulations and need for transparency in their operations. Consequently, organizations are adopting a growing number of tools considering compliance controls resulting in growing complexity. This is to ensure that all the governance requirements can be met without wasting companies' resources.

Challenge of regulatory compliance

One of the trickiest aspects of regulatory compliance concerns the competency of the personnel. People must not only be trained and certified but also aware and up to date of the continuously changing instructions, standard procedures and corporate policies. But being compliant is not alone sufficient. It is equally important to be able to prove the compliance. And when you look at it, the proving part can be even more difficult.

Proving the regulatory compliance

Proving the compliance means that an organization has to be able to provide valid answers to such questions as "have the employees globally understood your anti-bribery policy", "are the machine operators aware of the updated safety instructions", "prove that the sales people know the correct use of your product", "are this individual's certificates up-to-date and for how long", just to name a few. When these questions are extended to cover the supplier and distributor network, things do not get any easier. If the training regulations are badly overlooked, it may in extreme cases result in substantial sanctions.

There is also a grey area between the training and quality assurance. The instructions and other related documentation are regularly revised but it is not practical or affordable to arrange training sessions after each and every revision. A more flexible approach would involve the possibility of personally informing people about the changes either with or without assessing and testing their knowledge and awareness. Online or instructor led trainings should be organized only when the nature of the revision requires that. The challenge lies in efficient recordings of learning activities other than participation in trainings. Who have read and understood the revised instruction?

Tackling regulatory compliance issues with Valamis

Valamis, based on the xAPI standard, provides you an opportunity to tackle the above-mentioned problems almost completely. With traditional learning solutions, everything was about participating and passing the courses. Today it is possible to have not only the training contents and validation periods but also the documents, instructions and the user interaction cover by xAPI tracing. This allows recording the activities such as instruction reads, personal confirmations of understanding and answering to the validation questions attached to the revised instructions.

Now virtually everything is in place. After recording training and QA activities to the Learning Record Store, the rest is just straightforward searching, filtering and reporting. There will be dramatically less difficult audit questions. And since it is very simple to target the contents to right persons, the users don't have to use any more energy in thinking whether they should today check the quality handbook, enroll to a GMP course or could they simply focus on doing their work.

For more information, visit valamis.arcusys.com.