What’s your system for managing Compliance?

What does compliance have to do with ISO 9001?

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines compliance as “the act of obeying an order, rule, or request”: adhering to an externally imposed requirement.

The very first section (Section 1, Scope) of ISO 9001:2015 requires organisations to meet applicable statutory and regulatory requirements. In other words, your quality management system must follow the law. The same expectation runs through ISO 45001, ISO 14001, and increasingly through ISO/IEC 27001:2022 information security and ISO 42001 AI management, where privacy, data protection and emerging AI regulation all create legal obligations you need to track.

Managing changes to legislation manually can be time-consuming and inefficient, and nearly impossible when you consider there are over 90,000 amendments per year.

So how does an organisation maintain compliance with legal requirements? How do you keep up to date? There are a number of ways, but here are a few options.

SAI Global’s Lawlex service

An SAI Global product helps organisations tackle this problem by offering an automated email alert service called Lawlex Premium Legislative Alerts.

The Lawlex Premium service provides users with:

An email alert service that notifies customers about new legislation, as well as changes to current legislation they are tracking.

• The ability to set customised profiles according to each user’s requirements.
• Notification by email within 24 hours of publicly announced changes to legislation, or the introduction of new legislation.
• Plain English summaries of changes written by legally trained editors.
• Links through to official government sources (i.e. Federal Register of Legislation, NSW Parliamentary Counsel, State Law Publisher).

Premium Research, which provides value-added information about the legislation, such as commencement information and a history of amendments.

• Authoritative and comprehensive: a reliable source of all current Australian law.
• Access to history of amendments tables, commencement information and gazette notice references.
• Access to second reading speeches, explanatory memoranda and historical versions of the legislation.
• View Bill progress from introduction to assent, with detailed alerts about the progress of a Bill through each stage.

Onboarding and training

• New users are contacted by the client support manager to begin the onboarding and training discussion.
• Regular online training is provided.

Add-on modules

• Code Connect: a tool that provides access to all the codes of practice referenced in Australia.
• Lex Connect: identifies any Australian Standard referenced in legislation.

For more information on SAI Global’s compliance update service, see the free search version or the premium subscription information.

Legislative and regulatory website alerts

If the Lawlex subscription option isn’t for you, you can always subscribe to the email alert services offered by most legislative and regulatory websites. These will issue your contact person with an alert email when there are updates or changes to legislation.

• https://www.legislation.gov.au/ (Federal law)
• https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/ (QLD law)
• https://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/ (NSW law)
• https://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/ (VIC law)
• https://www.legislation.tas.gov.au/ (TAS law)
• https://www.legislation.sa.gov.au/ (SA law)
• https://www.legislation.wa.gov.au/ (WA law)
• https://legislation.nt.gov.au/ (NT law)

Safety codes of practice

We have put together a list of safety codes of practice applicable across the country, available here.

Speak with an experienced ISO auditor

If you’d like help building compliance management into your management system, you’ll work directly with an experienced ISO auditor and our systems are built to certify first time. Email hello@streamline.business, call Brisbane 07 3667 8280, Sydney 02 8315 7780 or Melbourne 03 9034 3990, or get in touch here. One of our consultants will respond within one business day.