If your company needs to prove compliance, you’re probably using your own home-grown system to manage the process, collect evidence and track your progress. And that means you’re wasting hundreds of man-hours—and tens of thousands of dollars per year. I guarantee it.
No matter what technologies and software you’re using, if it’s a system you’ve created in-house, your compliance team is spending as much as 200-300 percent more time on compliance activities than you need to. That translates to wasted man-hours, wasted salary costs, wasted productivity and wasted opportunity costs. Organizations applying to be certified that use TCT Portal see a multiple of positive return on their investment. How much of an ROI is possible? You’d be surprised. Let’s look at the numbers.
The Compliance Management Process
Before we do the nitty-gritty numbers, let’s establish what happens during the compliance cycle. No matter what your in-house system for tracking compliance looks like, there is a series of activities that will take place over time. Those activities include:
- Taking baseline status. Compare the elements that are already in place to the standard’s requirements. Which elements are in place? Which ones are on their way? Which are definitely not in place?
- Audit team meetings. What is the overall project status? Who has done what this week? Is it correct or need to be rejected? Which things can get checked off the To-Do list? What issues are coming up? Usually these are weekly or bi-weekly, depending on where you are in the process.
- Establishing/maintaining a storage framework. Where are you going to put your files and evidence? How will you keep it organized? What naming conventions will you use?
- Data collection. How will evidence be submitted? How is it actually being submitted? What will you do to track the evidence that is improperly submitted, so that it doesn’t get lost?
- Coordinating with third parties. Does the auditor have what they need? Are your vendors supplying what you need? Who do you have to talk to in order to get things moving faster?
If you’re using a home-grown system, you’re wasting time and energy in each of these activities. For example, how will you handle naming conventions? Often, people will choose to name documents by the requirement number that they apply to. Sometimes they create folders for each requirement as well. If you name files based on their requirements, your overall information security policy could be tied to over 150 different requirements. So how do you name that? If you create folders for each requirement, how do you store the information security policy that relates to 150 folders?
Handpicked related content: How One Company Took the Stress out of Compliance Management
When I was manually tracking compliance, I would spend as much as two hours before every weekly status meeting, just attempting to figure out current status. It was coming at me in more than half a dozen different ways—emails, hard copies, file shares, internal network folders, phone calls, voicemails, text messages, you name it. And we still had to take time during the status call to cover miscellaneous Q&A for items with uncertain status. That was a good two man-hours of company time wasted doing Q&A, every week. That was just my own inefficiency, let alone all the other members of the team doing things ineffectively!
The ROI of TCT Portal vs. Home-grown Systems
As a result, it’s not uncommon for an internal compliance team to spend over 800 hours per year managing compliance. If you’re paying your team an average rate of $40 per hour, that’s $32,000 per year on compliance activities alone. TCT Portal costs as little as $3,000 per year. When you do the math, TCT Portal pays for itself if it reduces your time by a mere 75 hours—that’s a nine percent time savings. If TCT Portal can cut your time on compliance by just ten percent, you’re boosting profitability.
So what kind of ROI can you reasonably expect from TCT Portal? Let’s break it down. We’ll look at two sets of numbers (Year 1, and Year 2+), because TCT Portal gains value as you get into Operational Mode.
ROI in Year 1
| Activity | Manual (man-hours) | TCT Portal (man-hours) | Time Savings |
| Status meeting prep work | 18 | 0 | 100% |
| Weekly meeting time | 48 | 24 | 50% |
| Creating a storage system from scratch | 20 | 0 | 100% |
| Developing a process for collecting evidence and tracking compliance | 40 | 2 | 95% |
| Evidence collection/tracking | 480 | 420 | 12.5% |
| Organizing evidence | 240 | 0 | 100% |
| Time discussing status with auditor | 6 | 0 | 100% |
| Total | 852 | 446 | 48% |
ROI in Year 2 and Beyond
| Activity | Manual (man-hours) | TCT Portal (man-hours) | Time Savings |
| Status meeting prep work | 18 | 0 | 100% |
| Weekly meeting time | 48 | 24 | 50% |
| Maintaining the storage system | 4 | 0 | 100% |
| Developing a process for collecting evidence and tracking compliance | 20 | 0 | 100% |
| Evidence collection/tracking | 440 | 240 | 45% |
| Organizing evidence | 200 | 0 | 100% |
| Time discussing status with auditor | 6 | 0 | 100% |
| Sorting through loose ends from last year | 80 | 0 | 100% |
| Total | 816 | 264 | 68% |
A reasonable ROI with TCT Portal is five to nearly eight times greater than what you need for a positive return! That’s as much as $19,000 in costs per year that you’ve recovered. (Of course, actual numbers will vary, based on your current system, size of your team and other factors.) Let’s flesh that out to see what kind of business opportunities that could mean.
Business Opportunities with TCT Portal
If your compliance management process only takes 264 man-hours per year, then you’re saving over 550 hours per year. Your business is immediately more profitable by nearly $20,000, but it also creates new revenue. Here’s how.
That savings of 550 hours is more than 13 man-weeks. That’s a full quarter of the year. If your employees had an extra quarter to dedicate to their core work, how much more revenue could they generate for your company? How much more productive could your company be if you had an extra quarter in your year?
Handpicked related content: How We Make the Pain of Compliance Go Away
Switch to TCT Portal
Everything we do at TCT is designed to make you more efficient, more effective and happier at work. That’s why we priced TCT Portal so affordably—the decision should be an absolute no-brainer for every business. The net result is that you’re saving time, generating greater profits and growing your business more effectively.
See what TCT Portal can do for your business. Schedule a demo today.
