Understanding the Compliance Register & why you need one

We put the call out to our Newsletter readers, on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for questions. Questions that people are struggling with around ISO, Lean or leadership that they wanted help with and we got some fantastic responses that we have loved reading through and thinking about how we can help. We can't answer everything but we'll do our best to get through as many as we can. Welcome, to the Thursday Q&A!

This Week's Question 

This question actually comes from someone who phoned us looking for help after they got non-conformance in their ISO audit. The reason they got the non-conformance was that they didn't have an accurate legal other compliance register, they want to know what is it ? And why do I need it? 

The Feedback

terFirstly what is your legal and other compliance register? Think about it as a list of laws, guidelines, requirements and acts and all that sort of stuff that you have to meet to be in business. So it might be the health and safety at work act, it could be an employee relations act, it could be, New Zealand it's the ACC act amongst many, and so you'll have a register of those things that you have to comply with to be in business. Part of the list should be about how you actually go about meeting those requirements what steps are you taking as a business to make sure that you meet the obligations in these requirements. So, for example, the Holidays Act, how do you calculate people's holidays that sort of stuff, you will have a process for doing that.

The other part of this list is going to be guidelines or industry standards that you have to meet, your iso system for instance, should be in there. Your quality manual or your ISO27001 manual will be in there as your methods for meeting the requirements. The purpose of this register is to make sure that you as a business are considering all of these things when you're making decisions about what you're doing with your products, what you're doing with your people, what you're doing with your business and how you meet your various standards. So you have to take them into account when you're making decisions about everything you do, if you're not aware of what you should be considering then how do you know you're making the right decisions?

As an example if you're a medical device company there are FDA requirements for assuring regulatory requirements in terms of recall, depending on the market you're in, you have different recall requirements for them. That means you need to know which markets you're in and what legal requirements there are for those. They are going to be listed on your legal another requirements register and there are a whole range of other things in there some will be things you decide yourself you're going follow and this is our standard so the aim is to create a register of all those things that's going make life easier for you as a business. You should be able to double check that you are following those things.

It's also important to make sure that you review on a regular basis. Laws change, laws get updated, so you need to make sure that you keep them in check and that you're always on top of those things. So that's the point of the legal other requirements register why it comes out in the audit it's one of those things that's in the context of organic organization, it helps define where you work and what things you have to comply with so it falls under those categories and that's why the auditor is looking for it.

I hope that was useful um as always love to hear your questions stick them in the comments below or add them to our website look forward to hearing from you as always let's keep improving.

Got a question

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