For utility organizations, maintaining NERC CIP compliance is an ongoing challenge. Audit-readiness isn’t a one-and-done activity, it’s something that you must operationalize through continuous processes and improvements, every day, every month, and every year. This would be true even if NERC standards and requirements stayed the same – you still need to keep up with changes within your own organization – but of course, they don’t. NERC regulations change constantly, and it’s your responsibility to change with them.
Let’s say you’re running an automated compliance management solution like SigmaFlow. You have it configured to your processes with workflows and policies in place, it’s all working smoothly as it should – and then NERC makes a bunch of changes. Now what?
With some compliance management solutions, it would be time to get on the phone with your internal development team or external development resources. You would have to get into their queue (never short) and often incur costs that were not part of your compliance management budget. You don’t have a choice – you need to comply with the new standards – but waiting and paying for the changes isn’t exactly fun.
Other solutions, like SigmaFlow, allow you to make changes to your program without the need for IT and/or development resources. That means you can quickly adapt to changes like new job functions, new work items, new due dates, etc. and deploy them all quickly to remain compliant.
With SigmaFlow, business users can make a wide variety of updates to NERC compliance management processes on their own, no extra time or budget required. For example, you can:
- Implement RSAW changes
- Build or modify reports with a wizard-based approach
- Create unlimited data tables with relationships
- Ensure that data field types automatically render with the correct UI component (Select List, Date, Text, etc.)
- Easily select the fields you want to quickly create as many forms as needed
- Add new or modify existing workflows to meet new or changing conditions….all without writing a line of code or tapping into your development resources.
Your compliance automation platform should be as adaptable as your organization when it comes to maintaining NERC compliance. If they make changes, you need to make them too, and time and money are always of the essence. Guarantee that you can quickly implement NERC standards changes and evolve with their changing requirements with a solution that empowers business users instead of getting in your way.
SigmaFlow is a leading provider of Process Execution solutions. The company’s NERC Compliance Solution is a real-time, evidentiary based software solution that solves the challenges of CIP & 693 Compliance. The SigmaFlow Compliance Solution manages all documents, data, and work activities while automatically collecting and building the evidence for NERC compliance in a real-time repository. SigmaFlow products place a strong emphasis on embedding domain knowledge through a process-driven template-based-architecture. Contact us at sales@sigmaflow.com to learn more.
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