Simplifying NERC Evidence Management

Ensuring compliance with NERC Reliability Standards is essential for power corporations and cooperatives. The compliance process includes identifying relevant standards, aligning compliance activities with them, collecting substantial evidence, and efficiently managing reporting across various authorities.

Compliance leaders in power organizations are responsible for efficiently managing compliance processes and ensuring the reliability of the power system.  

By its nature, NERC standards require organizations to produce and manage a substantial volume of documents and evidence, and reporting is mandatory. This process poses numerous challenges for compliance leaders and their teams. Handling a large volume of physical documents can be time-consuming and may lead to data loss and reporting discrepancies. 

Challenges 

If you are responsible for managing compliance at a power corporation or power cooperative, you are likely facing the following issues when managing evidence for NERC compliance. 

• You are investing time traveling across locations to collect evidence from transmission owners, generator owners, balancing authorities, and other stakeholders. 
• Struggling with tracking the NERC framework and aligning evidence with the updated requirements. 
• The lack of centralization of collected evidence is causing process inconsistency and repeated follow-ups, and you feel buried under a massive pile of folders. 

Solution 

VComply enables compliance professionals to simplify the evidence collection and management process for NERC compliance. Below are some of the key features of the platform: 

Steps to follow 

Follow the steps below to switch the NERC evidence management process to autopilot using the VComply platform. 

Step 1: Set up the NERC framework with specific requirements for which you need the evidence 

NERC reliability standards consist of 14 standard categories and over 90 requirements, but not all are necessary for your organization. Therefore, the first step is to define the exact NERC requirement framework your organization needs to maintain compliance.

For this, you have two options: either embed the entire NERC framework from the framework library and edit it according to your needs or create the framework manually in the program module. 

Step 2: Set up connections across stakeholders  

Once the NERC requirement framework is set up, it’s time to create connections among stakeholders across locations who will actively contribute to the evidence creation and submission process. 

With VComply, you can: 

1. Onboard people into the VComply platform using their email IDs.
2. Create different workgroups and responsibility centers specific to a location or team.

This way, you can bring everyone onto the digital platform, eliminating the need to travel to collect evidence. 

Step 3: Create standard-specific tasks for your team 

You can create requirement-specific tasks and assign them to specific stakeholders at this step. With the created tasks, specify the evidence requirements and facilitate assignees to upload them while completing their tasks. Stakeholders can upload evidence remotely and create folders to organize evidence documents. 

Automated alerts are generated every time you create a task or when an assignee completes a task or fails to do so. This process enhances digital collaboration within the organization. 

Step 4: Store and manage documents centrally 

Evidence uploaded by stakeholders is stored centrally in the responsibility workroom. To access them, go to the responsibility workroom ‘Files & Folders’ tab and download them. 

If the evidence does not match the quality standards, share that feedback with the concerned stakeholders through the comments section in the same workroom.