Compliance management sucks. But TCT Portal was designed by compliance personnel to make compliance management suck a lot less. And our customers are continually discovering just how successfully we’ve hit that goal.
TCT’s custom certifications feature is one example of ways to integrate the secret sauce of your organization while leveraging a tool which dramatically increases efficiency. Custom certifications allow you to build in your own process and adapt the compliance workflow to fit your specific business requirements.
What Is a Custom Certification?
A custom certification gives you the ability to create your own list of collection items that you need for some purpose that’s unique to your organization.
Custom certifications are a tool exclusively within TCT Portal that lets you design your own data collection list for any need you might have — whether it’s for translating a complicated compliance standard into plain English or your own unique internal purposes.
You can use the custom certification as a standalone collection tool, or link it to one or more certifications that you go up against. Take advantage of TCT’s status monitoring and automation features to run your custom certification just as efficiently as your other compliance engagements.
Let’s take a look at three ways TCT clients are making use of custom certifications.
1) One List to Rule Them All
Some of our clients have gradually taken on more and more certifications until they have an unruly mess on their hands. They started out with something like HIPAA, then added on SOC 2, then ISO, and PCI-DSS, then NIST CSF, and so on.
As their list of compliance standards grew, their compliance management engagements became unwieldy. Each standard had its own collection list, and each collection list had multiple items that the others also required. That meant they were recollecting the same bunch of items multiple times across all their compliance standards.
Custom certifications gave them a way out. The client worked with their Assessor to produce a master list of items to be collected across all of their certifications. This list included every document and piece of information that’s required among all of their compliance certifications.
Now they had just one collection list instead of five, and every item was listed just once.
We loaded up that collection list into TCT Portal as a custom certification. All they have to do is load each item to the master collection list. Using TCT’s live linking, each item is automatically populated in each of the requirements across all of the certifications, exactly where it needs to be.
Instead of managing five different collection lists for five different certifications, there’s just one master list that automatically replicates supplied evidence out to requirements across each certification they need to comply with.
They can also take that single collection list and use it in Operation Mode in a similar manner. The custom certification eliminates a ton of redundancies and saves an incredible amount of time. Everything is more streamlined, organized, and sane.
Related: Multiple Certifications? You Only Need One Compliance Management Tool
2) Track and Monitor Custom Projects
You might have an internal need to do on-site physical inspections at your facilities, because there are some very specific items that you want to monitor. There’s no ready-to-go system that you can just plug and play to do your thing. Instead, you’ve probably built your own internal tracking mechanism over time. You can port that data collection list straight over into TCT Portal and leverage it as a custom certification.
Effectively, the custom certification takes the place of your internal tool and old tracking spreadsheets. As a bonus, you gain all the benefits of using TCT Portal: the end-to-end workflow automation, centralized repository, reliably backed up, and readily accessible files.
Better yet, the same efficiency tool being leveraged to support the IT Compliance activities of your business can now be leveraged for other purposes within the organization, cutting down on internal maintenance of the custom system, and training needs for new personnel.
3) Simplify Client Engagements
If you’re a Consultant or Assessor, you can use custom certifications to provide a standout customer experience for your clients that makes compliance easier for them.
Many of our Assessor customers want to give their clients a proprietary, simple, streamlined, confusion-free compliance engagement. Custom certifications can help you reduce the depth and complexity of a certification for clients.
For example, a PCI certification has plenty of confusing language in the various requests. So rather than just facing the raw language of the certification itself to clients, you can create your own straightforward client-facing request list. This simplifies the process, eliminates confusion, and reduces your client’s responsibilities.
Create your own custom request list to collect and track against all the elements you need from a client, then apply the items automatically — precisely where they’re needed on the resultant certifications / standards — through live linking. This approach allows you to use whatever language you want, provision guidance as you see fit, and make evidence submissions as simple or complex as you’d like.
Custom certifications allow you to continue to make use of the amazing process and efficiency improvements to be gained through TCT Portal, which retains the differentiated value of the approach of your organization. And when you leverage your custom list through TCT Portal, your intellectual property is protected. We never share your proprietary information with other firms.
How Will Custom Certifications Optimize Your Compliance Engagements?
These are only three examples of how you can use custom certifications in TCT Portal. There’s an unlimited number of uses that you could discover on your own. Get creative and tell us how you’re making TCT’s custom certifications your own.
TCT can help you set up your customized certification. Contact us and we’ll have it up and running for you in no time.
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