More and more compliance assessors are getting fed up with the chaos of client engagements. Manual processes are painfully inadequate, and they end up costing your assessment firm thousands of dollars in inefficiencies.
TCT’s recent webinar, “How Automation Boosts Auditor ROI,” revealed how automation can make your assessments more effective. Presented by guests Steve Levinson and Sherri Collis from Online Business Systems, the webinar showed how assessment firms can benefit from automated systems like TCT Portal.
Discover more: Why Compliance Auditors Say TCT Portal Is a Lifesaver
Missed the webinar? No worries! Read on for key takeaways, and to find out how to get an on-demand version of the webinar.
Frustrations of Traditional Assessments
Online Business Systems spent close to ten years conducting various assessments the traditional way. Steve and Sherri shared a bit about the pain of those years:
- The struggle to keep dozens of pages of notes organized
- Trying (and often failing) to share knowledge and information among the assessment team
- Being unable to effectively divide and conquer, because many controls were intertwined
- Losing knowledge when assessors had to be switched out from one year to the next, whether due to reassignment or turnover
- Manually scanning through hundreds of report pages to find items that have fallen through the cracks
- Organizing hundreds of files of evidence that have been dumped in your lap
Steve said it was the frustration of all that work that drove them to switch to automation. “We were really in pain,” Sherri said. “We had worksheets and Word docs, and things weren’t being put in the file shares properly, and it was just a mess.”
Benefits of Automation
Once Online switched to automation, they discovered immediate benefits that allowed them to be more effective in their assessment roles. For example:
- Greater use of the team. Online can now divide up the work based on each person’s strengths. Everyone can work within the same document at the same time, doing different tasks.
- QA concurrently with the assessment, which streamlines the entire process.
- Real-time updates. Clients can go into the tool and see the status, so they always know what’s going on. Assessors don’t get interrupted from their work, and it enhances client experience.
- No loss of knowledge. If someone is out sick, all their knowledge is already in one central location.
“It is so much quicker,” Sherri said. “As opposed to typing up a Word document and scrolling all the way through it and trying to find areas where you haven’t filled out the information yet.” She added that automation takes fewer resources to do an engagement.
View the on-demand webinar, “How Automation Boosts Auditor ROI.”
What TCT Portal Can Do for Assessors
TCT’s Adam Goslin gave a quick tour of TCT Portal, and Sherri raved about her favorite features. TCT Portal automates the client engagement in a way no other compliance software can match.
“We’d been introduced to a lot of different compliance portals, and a lot of them were just way too complex to wrap your fingers around them,” Steve said. “I had lost faith in a lot of those compliance tools and portals that were out there. But Adam established his credibility early on. He was a recovering PCI person and was able to feel our pain. He’d been there before.”
Stops along the tour of TCT Portal included:
- The common repository. Keep all the evidence in the right place. Nothing gets lost.
- Easy-to-view status displays. See the most important information at a glance. Know immediately what items are in your queue, jump directly to the requirements that need your attention and filter out everything you don’t need to see.
- Automated requirement mapping. Have multiple standards for the same client? TCT Portal maps the evidence to the right requirements across multiple standards. Just click a button and it’s done for you. Over the course of a year, this feature alone could save your firm hundreds of man-hours.
- Operational Mode. Crank up your ROI after year one.
“I can’t say enough about Operational Mode,” Sherri said. After the initial assessment is done, the next year your clients can upload their files into TCT Portal as they do their maintenance activities throughout the year. When it’s time to do the assessment the next year, all of the Operational evidence is already in place and ready for review. Just go in and everything is in order, in its proper place. The tool sends automated reminders to the client throughout the year to take care of their maintenance tasks, so that they stay on top of their responsibilities and have less catch-up work when it’s time to do the annual assessments.
“My [time doing] status reporting, since using this tool, has gone down so much, because you’re giving your client real-time information,” Sherri said. There’s no need to put together a status report at the end of the day or week. Status updates are on-demand, without demanding more of you.
Listen to the Webinar On-demand!
Even if you missed the live webinar, you can listen to it on-demand. Discover more about using automation in your client engagements, and see what makes TCT Portal the platform of choice.
