Overview
Quality compliance monitoring is the quality assurance testing carried out over the day to day activities of the business. The compliance monitoring team provides assurance to the senior management that the organisation is operating within a compliant framework. Monitoring is a little understood element of process management although it serves as a powerful tool to ensure that quality, ethics and compliance processes continue to work and improve. For many, compliance monitoring is a clear expectation but has not been well defined, leaving many organisations at a disadvantage in understanding how to effectively incorporate it into their ethics and compliance management efforts. Unlike other recommended compliance activities, monitoring (and auditing, as well) is less of a defined, discrete activity and more a part of a management process. It needs to be designed to fit and be incorporated into other activities. Without strong monitoring techniques, the compliance process is likely to fail or fall out of date as external changes antiquate a business process. Due to the burgeoning recognition of intricate interdependence of compliance and monitoring in recent years, monitoring has become a basic expectation of ethics and compliance management. This course tailored for the Power Generation, Transmission and Distribution Industry emphasises and covers, among other things, reasonable steps that an organisation needs to follow to ensure that compliance and monitoring are followed to detect deviations, weaknesses, successes and failures. The course also shows how and why monitoring is a critical management activity, one of five principal components of good risk management and control practices. Concomitantly, it shows how monitoring helps ensure that internal control operates effectively.
Energy Sector Quality Compliance Monitoring Course Outline (Pretoria, South Africa)
- Accountable Managers, Quality Managers
- Audit Managers, Compliance Managers
- Regulators, Engineers, Administrators
- Compliance, ethics, auditing and monitoring personnel
- Leaders within organisations, Legal advisors
- Others who need to have a good understanding of quality compliance monitoring in the Energy Sector
By the end of this course, participants should be:
- familiar with the different terms and system relations within an organization
- understanding the different terms with regards Quality Compliance Management
- aware of the process-oriented approach and its importance for compliance
- knowing the different types of processes
- familiar with the idea of controlled processes
- understanding the Management System Structure
- conversant with the Compliance Management Principles
- comfortable with the Components of a Compliance System
- aware of the main actors within the Compliance Management System
- conversant with regulatory requirements and standards
- comfortable with compliance monitoring
- aware of the costs caused by Compliance and a lack thereof
- familiar with relevant law
Monitoring Objectives
- Overview, conceptualisation and definition of issues
- How monitoring helps to ensure that a business activity is taking place, actually works and functions within legal perimeters
- Ensuring that expected outcomes are occurring
- Identify, review and determine handling of variations to expected outcomes
- Dealing with intentional or deliberate deviations
- Reinforcing that management watches over processes and acts
- Helps improve accuracy, efficiency and effectiveness
- Captures possible and/or actual failures
- Helps in documenting a process’s existence, operation and oversight
- Assisting in reporting on outcomes
- Monitoring both external and internal changes to help ensure adjustment to these changes.
- Ensuring the meeting of legal obligations
- The essence of prior, during or after business monitoring
- When and how to monitor complex procedures (previews, occurrence and reviews)
- Factors influencing management decision on what to monitor, how comprehensively and when to do so
- Operational management and questions of accountability oversight
- Actual monitoring, why monitoring and the variety of monitors
- activity’s sensitivity
- staff’s requisite competence
- Determination of activity in relation to whether it meets, comes close to or fails to meet its goals and the reason why.
- Generated data and how and when to decide on appropriate action
- Outcomes of monitoring
- Monitoring outcomes
- identifying actual or potential non-compliance
- taking actions that correct the non-compliance risks
- Identifying changes to the underlying activity or external environment
Monitoring steps and how they should be designed and conducted:
- The number of an activity’s transactions
- The cost of monitoring
- The ease of monitoring
- The risk of non-compliance – both its seriousness and likelihood
- Motives for operating staff not to comply
- using standardized templates and other materials customized to a process
- Self-Monitoring
How a responsible individual or group – such as operations staff – monitors
- self-monitoring: when and why? And how it impacts accountability
- How would management provide greater assurance that self-monitoring efforts are working
Where monitoring is made an ongoing activity versus a periodic, discrete one
- How is continuous monitoring practically done?
- Whose responsibility would it be and under which circumstances
- How is it related to internal control mechanisms?
- How appropriate is automated technology to this process and why?
- How and when does it use disparate data from multiple processes and why
- Basic principles of Quality Management
- Understanding associated terminology
- Quality Management in the context of Power Generation, Transmission and Distribution
- The role of the Accountable Manager in relation to the QMS
- The relationship between Quality & Safety Management systems
- Understanding the regulations in relation to Quality Management
- Developing & implementing a QMS in support of business aims & objectives and in response to regulations
- Regulatory responsibilities of the Quality Manager
- Business requirement of the quality management function
- Fundamental principles of auditing
- Relative responsibilities of those managing and undertaking audits
- Development of audit programmes
- Best practice audit planning, conduct and reporting
- Effective corrective action
- An overview of quality compliance monitoring in the Energy sector,
- The Importance, objectives and consequences of non‐compliance.
- Types of Compliance Monitoring
- Monitoring Tools
- The Compliance Monitoring process
- Quality Compliance Process Approach
- Methodology
- Management System Working Elements
- Policy
- Forms of policies
- Compliance policy
- Processes
- Basic idea of controlled processes
- Norms & Customer Satisfaction
- Product & Service
- Customer & Supplier
- Conscious Process Management
- Documentation Structure
- Procedures
- Documentation & Records
- Controlled vs. uncontrolled
- Documents & Records
- Compliance Management Principles
- Roles and Responsibilities in a CMS
- Regulatory Requirements and Compliance Standards
- Evaluation and Continuous Improvement
- How much may Compliance cost?
- Law
- Compliance with SMS Requirements
The training approach is highly interactive. It uses a mixture of presentations by the facilitator and by participant(s), group or individual exercises, use of case studies and role plays. These proven learning techniques enhance understanding and retention of covered issues.