Intelligent Compliance Automation with Tines

Eliminate the Repetitive Tasks *AND* Get Better Security

Does seeing an email from you bring a sense of dread to your coworkers? If you work in compliance, the answer is probably “yes.” 

Manual evidence gathering and nagging emails — not to mention error-prone tasks and mind-numbing repetition — have given compliance a bad reputation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

“If it can be automated, automate it,” is a common sentiment in the tech industry, and for good reason. Using automation to reduce tedious repetitive tasks not only serves efficiency and scalability but also reduces organizational friction and creates a better environment for success. 

In this blog, we’ll explore one way to turn frustrating, repetitive, and manual compliance tasks into an automated, frictionless process: leveraging Tines automation and RegScale AI in one powerful integration. 

Evidence Collection: How to Lose Friends and Irritate People

There are compliance experts, and then there’s everyone else. And they speak very different languages. Collecting evidence to support the effectiveness of a control generally requires the compliance analyst to send and follow up on a series of emails. The control owner — a.k.a., the one who implements and monitors the policy or process that adheres to that control — generally has no idea what evidence they are being asked to produce or even how to attach it to the correct control. 

This kind of siloed process causes endless inefficiency. To be responsive and helpful, the evidence owner sends their best guess. The compliance analyst evaluates the evidence, sees it doesn’t quite fit the need, and asks for the evidence again — often without clarifying. This leads to a frustrating string of back and forth until the evidence owner either stops responding or gets lucky enough to send the right evidence. By then, frustration on both sides is high. 

Automate, Don’t Irritate

When compliance operates in a silo, organizations expose themselves to significant inefficiencies, potential fines, and reputational damage. Not everyone is a compliance expert, and expecting people to know exactly what’s required in the evidence they submit is a disaster waiting to happen. 

RegScale and Tines, the secure workflow-building platform, work together to offer a more seamless approach to evidence gathering. Leveraging the advanced automation capabilities of Tines, this RegScale story in the Tines library can trigger scheduled and on-demand workflows that send an email to collect evidence — and then match that evidence to the proper compliance controls. The evidence owner just needs to attach the requested evidence when replying to the request email. It’s simple, friendly, and frictionless for compliance analysts and non-experts alike. 

Automating evidence collection with Tines’ advanced workflow automation delivers critical advantages, including: 

• Resource optimization: Eliminate redundant activities, reducing costs and duplicative efforts across departments. 
• Streamlined response to regulatory change: Assess the implications of changing regulatory requirements on your evidence needs. Ensure more agile adaptation and consistent, continuous evidence across frameworks. 
• Enhanced stakeholder confidence: Showcase organizational maturity to investors, customers, and partners — who increasingly expect organizations to demonstrate robust governance frameworks and processes. 
• Improved audit outcomes: Automation ensures that consistent artifacts are generated, which in turn demonstrates a mature, resilient program and instills confidence. 
• Stop problems before they happen: Get alerted when evidence is out of date and trigger a Tines evidence refresh workflow from within the RegScale platform. 

RegScale’s intelligent platform also understands what evidence is collected and when, which can highlight changes that need to be communicated to compliance. By finding missing, old, outdated, or unneeded evidence — and then leveraging Tines’ automation to address it — RegScale is helping organizations mature their compliance programs allowing teams to concentrate on core competencies. 

Tips for Automating Evidence Collection

• Understand your evidence needs: Know what you need to collect, and how often. 
• Don’t boil the ocean: Trying to collect all your evidence, organization-wide, all at once is going to slow you down, introduce errors, and cause more friction. A steady, measured pace is what you want instead. 
• Set aside time for implementation and training: While there may be a small learning curve, it pales in comparison to the resource drain of manual, ad-hoc evidence collection. 
• Don’t be afraid to innovate: RegScale’s integration with Tines extends beyond evidence collection and can be used to automate other parts of your compliance program.  

What’s Next?

In the second installment of this three-part series, we will deep dive into how RegScale and Tines work together allowing customers to integrate compliance into established and tested organizational workflows without having to redesign them.  

To explore how an integrated compliance and risk management approach can transform your organization’s GRC program, browse our extensive resources or book a demo here.