Case Study
Transforming How High-Profile Regulations are ManagedHigh-profile policy regulations require timely input from a wide range of experts across an organization. Learn how one of the largest producers of regulations adopted SSI’s Regulations Management Digital Solution to completely transform how regulations are drafted, reviewed, approved, and managed from start to finish.
Challenge
Processing large policy documents that span different topical areas and require input from different experts and teams across the organization was a growing challenge. The complexity and burden of policy creation was steadily increasing as additional processes, tools, procedures, and personnel were added or adjusted. As the number of manual processes increased, so too did the difficulty in maintaining timely, secure, and quality operations. Too often process success was a function of an individual coordinator’s ability and availability to manage lists, spreadsheets, email, shared drives, SharePoint, and other tools. Communication, version control, reporting, and deadlines were just a few of the particularly challenging aspects to manage effectively. A mistake, at a minimum, could cause a delay and extra work for teams. On the other end of the scale, a mistake could result in significant litigation costs or unintended economic impacts.
Solution
A complete transformation of regulations policy management. SSI’s Digital Regulations Management solution was used to centralize, digitize, and manage the drafting, reviewing, and approving of policies. The solution transformed largely manual handling of policy regulations operations to digital enterprise services. Through retraining or upskilling, regulations management personnel were able to shift from their former way of manually processing policy items to the new digital processing of agency policy operations. The digital solution integrated into existing productivity tools, work environments, and teams for easy adoption and maximum productivity gain. SSI designed a Regulations Management System that introduced powerful new views of the regulation portfolio: those currently in the pipeline, in process, and published. Need to know if a policy is on-track or why it is off-track for publication? The system explorer tool uncovers critical milestone-based insights to help understand where something went wrong and what options are available for a course correction. The system boosts productivity and timeliness through the introduction of document segmentation and simultaneous authoring and clearance/approval capabilities.
Benefit
The new system was adopted by thousands of users dispersed across the U.S. Improved collaborative methods allowed teams to simultaneously review and revise policy documents, saving valuable time. The burden of manually managing policies from planning to publication was completely removed, which was life changing for the coordinators. A single document record now presented a single source of truth for the entire enterprise. The guess work was taken out of version control, document merging, deadlines, document comment management, and current round of clearance. Inputs from Subject Matter Experts deep within the organization were easily collected, approved, and made available to authoring teams. This translated into less rework, elimination of duplicative editing, faster processing times and higher quality policy coordination and generation. All combined with a powerful new level of tracking and visibility. The system ultimately unified operations, which strengthened enterprise policy management in ways formerly not possible.
Result
Four systems consolidated into one, which consolidated thousands of documents associated with a single regulation into one system record. Thousands of users across more than 50 policy components or groups were shifted to the new Regulations Management System . Usage of the system eliminated document version control errors. Faster review cycles achieved through push-button enterprise collaboration and segmentation. Segmentation eliminated the need to wait to start a review cycle until the entire document completed. When part of a large regulation with many sections was ready, the system allowed the coordinator to send the section to review. Statutory deadlines were proactively managed with more readily available information than ever before.