F
or utilities, complying with regulations can be a complicated business. It requires keeping up with changing requirements, collecting data, maintaining assets, responding to incidents and keeping everyone informed.
When dealing with infrastructure that provides vital services for the public, it’s important to have an effective system in place so you and your team don’t get lost among all the information and tasks.
Here are five of the best tips for keeping up with your regulatory requirements.
Identify your annual compliance requirements
To get started, you should figure out what your annual regulatory compliance requirements are and get them into your company calendar as soon as possible.
Ensure this calendar is reviewed regularly, and build reminders in as well, to make sure everyone involved in compliance has plenty of warning about the activity they’ll need to undertake well in advance.
This might involve preparing to undertake regular inspections, compiling maintenance history on assets or scheduling tasks across the year.
Engage with regulators regularly
You’ll be working with regulatory authorities frequently for audits and inspections, so get to know the relevant contacts you’ll be dealing with.
Particularly, you should understand what they’re looking for from you when you make submissions so you’re all on the same page.
For example, when it comes to vegetation management around powerlines, you should have all the relevant information and documentation to prove you’ve adequately cleared any potentially dangerous foliage or branches.
This could involve collecting data on the status of all powerlines and nearby trees, or keeping a history of all works taken by crews to clear branches or repair faulty wires.
Having this information available when needed will not only save time later on but also encourage transparency between your organisation and the regulator.
Understand and prioritise your obligations
Within your organisation, you should create policies and procedures with your obligations in mind to ensure you can deliver on what is required.
This is all about understanding your organisation’s obligations and then determining what you need to prioritise.
Make sure you know which people are responsible for various regulatory requirements, and empower these people to gather the information they need from various departments when it comes time to handing over that data to the regulator.
Track any regulatory violations
Meeting regulatory requirements also means keeping track of any instances where your organisation has failed to comply with regulations. This means having records about any incidents, accidents, faults and complaints.
It’s important that your employees can see where mistakes have been made before, and what the consequences were, in order to avoid making the same costly mistakes more than once.
For utilities, the consequences of failing to meet regulations can be severe since a mistake or accident could cause interruptions to essential services, property damage or endanger the public.
Knowing how these violations can impact your organisation will encourage accountability and help identify opportunities to continually improve.
Automate as much as possible
Since regulatory compliance is critical in the utility industry, it helps to make the job easier for your team by utilising tools that allow you to automate processes.
Rather than leaving things up to individual staff or reminders from the regulator, employing a work management system that can take care of certain processes can leave your staff to focus on what’s important.
Keeping on top of compliance
This is where Xugo comes in, to help track the various compliance activities your business undertakes, including automating data entry, reminders, reports and more.
Turning to a comprehensive and effective work management software like Xugo ensures no stone is left unturned when it comes to maintaining critical assets and keeping essential services running.
