Regulatory compliance – those two little words have significant ramifications for many businesses. Industry rules and government regulations spell out what an organization must do in specific instances to protect data, ensure the safety of employees and visitors, safeguard products, and more.  A new generation of Visitor Software can play an important role in meeting guidance.

One often-overlooked area where regulatory compliance plays a significant role is visitor management. Visitor data is important in many different situations, including during emergencies, administrative planning, and even as evidence in legal cases. However, when it comes to regulatory compliance, maintaining visitor records is critical for complying with local, regional, state, and federal mandates.

Of course, this goes far beyond maintaining a paper visitor logbook. Today’s fast-paced businesses require something much more capable of dealing with the influx of vendors, visitors, contractors, and others. Visitor software provides robust capabilities, from visitor registration to tracking and photo identification.

How can visitor software help your business ensure compliance with industry rules and government regulations? We’ll explore some of the most important ways in this post.

Health Regulation Compliance

While many organizations have relaxed their COVID-19 policies, some have not. Health regulation compliance helps ensure that businesses can police their facilities and comply with maximum occupancy limits, prove that visitors stated they were not showing signs of COVID-19, and track who entered the facility and when to help support contact tracing.

It’s not just about COVID-19, though. We live in a world increasingly at risk of epidemics and pandemics. It is only a matter of time before the next health emergency. Business owners and decision-makers should implement visitor software now to ensure they’re prepared for what will come.

Food Safety Regulation Compliance

Few things are as integral as access to safe food. Today’s food industry is vast and sprawls across the entire planet. Ensuring safety is not a simple thing and requires that everyone plays their part in the process, including food manufacturers, suppliers, growers, and more. For most of these organizations, that means complying with the rules outlined in the US Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2011.

The Act deals with a host of food safety-related concerns, including creating a written food safety plan that states the hazards that apply to your specific products, likely threats, and an individualized response and management plan for each.

While these plans must be customized to your unique business, product, and segment of the food and beverage industry, part of your strategy must include limiting and monitoring visitors to your facility/facilities. Anyone with access to your products at any point in the production process must be identified and tracked to comply with regulations and ensure the safety of our food.

The USDA also requires that food industry businesses comply with specific regulations. In this case, it’s compliance with NIST SP 800-53, dealing with USDA and FSIS information systems and data compliance. When it comes to visitor management, companies must maintain visitor access to records that include the name, organization, and signature of the visitor, their proof of ID, date of access, time of entry and departure, and the stated reason for their visit.

Sensitive Information Regulation Compliance

We live in the age of “big data” when information is considered more valuable than currency. Increasingly, information is at risk. That includes proprietary business information, trade secrets, government-related information, and even customer/consumer data. These rules apply to an incredibly wide range of industries, from credit card processors to companies that manufacture equipment that the US government deems sensitive.

You’re required to prove that you’re safeguarding that information. Part of that involves recordkeeping and verifying the citizenship of anyone who has access to sensitive information (under the National Industrial Security Program’s Operating Manual, as well as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations). In short, you must track who had access to this information and when that access was granted.

In Conclusion

Maintaining visitor logs is critical today. Outmoded, manual methods like logbooks are incapable of capturing and safeguarding visitor information on the level that today’s regulations require. Visitor software, on the other hand, can easily capture this information, as well as visitor photos, and then store and maintain that data for as long as necessary, ensuring compliance for businesses.