Finding ways to streamline what tends to be a lengthy and onerous environmental audit process can have a big impact on your business. If all the information related to your project isn’t well-organized or maintained in a central location, finding the documents you need, delivering them to your auditors and answering their questions regarding those documents can be painful, to say the least. In this quick video, we show you how a Firmex virtual data room can be used to provide speed, security, and clarity in your next environmental audit.
Running an Audit with a Firmex Virtual Data Room
Your audit begins when your auditor sends over a lengthy checklist of audit items. Your team takes a deep breath, preparing for the marathon that lies ahead, starts looking for those items and emails them to the auditor. Delays and confusion happen when a file is too big for email, when the auditor doesn’t receive a file or can’t find a file you sent, and when the wrong version of a document is sent or needs to be revised. Given the large number and size of the files that need to be shared, document gridlock – and all the frustration and hair-pulling that goes along with it – is all too common.
With a Firmex virtual data room, you first import the checklist into the data room. Then, you use statuses and tags to assign items to various team members. Users can drag-and-drop the appropriate files to the corresponding line items, and Firmex does the rest.
Auditors are notified as soon as a new item is uploaded, and any time a new version of a file is added to the data room, it is automatically detected. Now everything needed to facilitate the audit is collected and maintained in a central, secure location.
Security
Unlike email or other generic file sharing services, a virtual data room gives you complete control over the documents you share with auditors. Dynamically generate watermarks with the auditor’s name on every document. Allow auditors to open documents in their native application while preventing printing. When the audit is over, expire access to those documents, even if they’ve been saved to an auditor’s computer.
Communication
Never miss an auditor’s question again with the Firmex Virtual Data Room’s built-in Q&A feature. An auditor asks a question regarding a specific audit item directly within the data room, and you’re automatically notified via email. You can answer the question, reference a document, or assign the question to your team members. Every question is tracked, so nothing gets overlooked.
Audit snapshots can be run at any time giving you a view into exactly how the audit is progressing and to pinpoint any bottlenecks in the process. Full reporting shows you which documents have been seen, and which haven’t. And because everything is tagged and indexed in the data room, finding items is fast and intuitive. With a virtual data room, not only are all your documents kept in one central location, but all of your communications related to the audit as well – no more hunting around in your inbox for emails and attachments.
Summing Up
A virtual data room can significantly streamline the environmental audit process. Our clients in the energy, oil & gas, and mining industries use the Firmex virtual data room platform to bring a secure, consistent, repeatable and traceable process and workflow to their audits. It’s about bringing new efficiencies to document sharing and the back-and-forth communication with auditors in order to speed up the audit, keep things on track and reduce the costs of compliance.
