An effective way to manage Policies and SOPs
An effective way to manage Policies and SOPs
Policies and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) play a fundamental role in every organization. One of their main purposes is to shed light on the complex and otherwise ambiguous world of roles and responsibilities. What task must an employee perform? How must this task be exactly performed? When? What about frequency? Who has to be consulted and/or informed about this?
If an organization fails in clearly defining and communicating roles and responsibilities it may generate feelings of distrust, uncertainties, and it is highly likely that these feelings may lead to potential conflicts, non conformities and many other issues.
At this point you may envision the importance of having a tool that helps ensuring the communication and availability of SOPs for users. Globodox is definitively that tool. This powerful Document Management Software offers a large array of features that would give a significant boost to your business.
A brief review of the main features
Let’s take a look at which key aspects would be required to reach a highly effective SOPs management.
- Diversity of roles – In some companies there is a specific centralized Department who is responsible for elaborating, getting approved, publishing and putting into force all of the rules and SOPs. In other companies, each Department assumes the responsibility of preparing and managing its own SOPs. In any case, there are at least two main differentiated roles: on one hand, one role in charge of the preparation and publication of the policies, and on the other hand the “user” role, the one who has to comply with the rules. Both roles need different privileges (the first one requires wide control -add, modify, delete- of the documents; the second only requires permissions to “view” the documents). Globodox allows the organizations to map security roles to existing designations/job profiles to decide the level of access each user has to the SOPs repository.
- Organization and Confidentiality – In some companies, the complete Policies’ BOK (Body Of Knowledge) may be huge, so organization is essential. Besides, some policies may be confidential. Globodox enables classification of all of the SOPs in as many folders and subfolders as required. You can also apply Security Labels which let you decide user access on a per document or per folder basis, granting access only to the documents that an user must work with.
- Search Capability – In terms of policies and SOPs, searching is like the cornerstone. It is indispensable that you can quickly find the required SOP in a timely manner. You cannot spend large minutes trying to find out how to perform some specific procedure while your customer is queuing and getting impatient. Globodox provides you with strong search capabilities, including Quick or Document Full Text searches.
- Overlapping avoidance – When many employees have permissions to modify SOPs it is essential to avoid overlapping, meaning that two employees may be working at the same time with the same document. If this happens the changes made by one of the employees could get overwritten leading to loss of time and efforts. Globodox’s Checkout feature ensures that while a document is being modified by one user, no other user can modify it. Very simple. Very effective.
- Version Management – Your business, and also the entire world, is dynamic. The same happens with your business policies and SOPs. As a result of this, one same policy can have many versions. Globodox versioning feature is useful when you need access to old copies of that document, for instance to respond to regulatory requests. You can also add Version Notes to remember the changes made for the version.
- Control – This is a highly critical topic. You need to have extensive control of your SOPs. Globodox gives you the opportunity to manage privileges on documents, folders and other entities. Also you can control the distribution of the SOPs, for instance disallowing printing, saving to local machine, emailing, etc. Moreover, with the event auditing feature you can log details about user actions (you can choose the actions you wish to log). As a result of this, you keep a record of the actions of all Globodox users.
Last, but not least, organizations who wish to be SOX and/or HIPAA compliant can use Globodox to take important steps towards that goal, since the usage of a Document Management System is considered to be an excellent element on this regard.
Try Globodox. In a very short timeframe you will find that managing your business SOPs and policies has never been so practical. and simple!
- Category: Publication
- January 23, 2019
