CMX1 Deep Dives#2
Enterprise Policy Management - How to Target, Publish, and Track Compliance with Brand Standards for both Internal & External Stakeholders

Chris Rice:    

Hi everybody. We're going to go ahead and get started with our webinar today. My name is Chris Rice. I'm CMX's Chief Product Officer. First of all, I want to thank each and every one of you for taking time out of your busy schedules to join us today for our webinar on all things policy management. Extremely excited to share these vast product updates that we have for you today. Before we get underway, just a few housekeeping items. If you need to drop off the call early or you have colleagues that couldn't attend, we'll be sending out a recording in the coming weeks, so look out for that. And if you missed our last webinar on incidents, which we did in October, feel free to also reach out to us and we can send you a link to that. And then just by way of things we have that are coming up, we are targeting a late January, early February webinar on document management, which we are now hard at work on.  

But in terms of today's webinar, we're going to spend roughly 40 to 60 minutes and Matt Waldorf our product manager for the policy management module. He's going to take us through a few slides highlighting some of the big things we've been working on for this release, and then Jeremy Thomas, our solutions delivery engineer, is going to take us through a deep dive into the actual technology on one of our demo sites, and at the end we will do our best to, or throughout rather the webinar. We'll do our best to answer questions. So feel free to ping us in the chat and as always, get in touch with your customer success rep or one of our sales associates if you're interested in exploring how this could work for your business. So with that, I'm going to toss things over to Matt to get into the slides.  

Matt Waldorf:    

Thanks Chris. Welcome everyone. Over the course of the next several slides, I'm going to highlight a number of features and we'll take a deeper dive into some important concepts. The first feature I'll call attention to is our new landing page, which offers two views, grid mode versus tree mode. The two options give users a choice in the way they want to view the policies that are applicable and relevant to them as an individual using the system. Next, with the parent and child feature enterprise policy content managers can create rich hierarchies and relationships between records for easy exploration and linking with the ability to add high level policies and linking more detailed policies underneath these parent policies, we'll offer the ability to add depth and detail for policies to clearly articulate brand standards. Shortcuts and related content help to reinforce the importance of certain policies throughout different content categories.  

As an example, a hand washing policy or procedure relates to multiple policy content categories such as Safe Food Handling, washing hands after garbage disposal, and COVID-19 best practices. With the CMX1 policy management module, users can quickly see the difference between a policy, which is content that will help describe a given standard and a procedure, the details on how a user should perform a certain task and describing the actions that can be taken to ensure that the policy is going to be met. Policy management content editors have the ability to set up policies and procedures together as needed by their business. Our applicability engine provides the ability for content editors to ensure that users are getting critical information in a clear and concise way without having to sift through policy content that isn't relevant to their location or role. Applicability is achieved through the use of user profiles so that users with the correct profiles can view specific policies.  

We also have the ability to target specific geographical areas through location access, such that users with specific location access can see policies that are applicable to that location. Next is variations. Navigating the ever-changing government regulatory environment for international markets can be complex at best. With the CMX1 platform, content managers can set up specific variations of policy content to include variations for a geographic region to ensure that users at a given location are armed with the most up-to-date regulations, making them specific by a geographic location to account for complex regulatory regions around the world. Next is versioning and publishing in the future. This provides content editors with the ability to publish new versions of policies into the future, including support for draft statuses, which will help facilitate a thorough review of a new policy or policy edit to ensure it is ready before being published for a future date.  

Comparing versions over time as your business needs change due to customer expectation trends, additions, or changes in hospitality offerings or changes in an approach to hotel or restaurant cleanliness. It is important for end users to understand how policies are changing over time. With the CMX1 platform, users can quickly see how policies have been updated and show a comparison of new policy content in context with a previous version of a given policy. This helps keep everyone up to date on the latest policy and procedures that will guide your business in a dynamic environment. With the automated ID system, the policy is placed within a hierarchy of policies. CMX will apply an automated ID with levels represented by periods as an example, 2.1.3. We also use this concept to illustrate support for variations of the same policy with a variation identifier at the end of the policy number, which will be seen when Jeremy goes through our demo later on in this webinar. We have the ability to add external IDs and tags for historical linking to legacy systems or for regulatory schemes. Finally, we have better integration with Activity Studio. Within the policy library, users can see what activities are currently utilizing specific policies to understand how policy changes might impact activity content. Next, let's take a deeper dive at how the CMX1 platform can be used to enforce applicability of policies. The examples I'm going to walk through today are specific to hospitality, but our approach in building these features can apply to all industries that require the concept of applying specific policies to user types, locations, and brands and concepts. At the top, we have listed a few departments out of many that are critical to a given hospitality organization. Beneath that, we have policies that have been created that originate from those departments that has content relevant to the type of work performed within that department.  

We then have our applicability engine that applies business rules that are configurable in the CMX1 platform and at the bottom we have an illustration of the end users that will receive the output of policy content from the engine. Throughout a given hotel location there are multiple departments that have a set of policies and procedures that govern how a particular department should operate as a standard. However, there are policies that apply across departments so policies that originate from a specific department that apply to all staff. In this example, let's talk about data handling and network security. This specific policy originates from IT security and specifies that all staff must change their passwords on a regular basis and make sure their computers are locked when they step away from the front desk when they're working from a corporate office or when traveling from location to location.  

Here we can see how the applicability engine is interpreting the business rules of the network security policy and we ensure that all internal users within the company across property management, engineering and maintenance and above property management will see this policy content across all user types, all locations, and all brands. In this example, vendors has not selected it as this policy applies specifically within the internal organization. In this next example, we're going to look at physical security as a policy pertaining to facility management. Let's say there are policies related to a general cash safe at a hotel property where the policy dictates that the safe can only be accessed by authorized personnel using authorized credentials. Within the engineering and maintenance team, there are specific people or user types that implement and maintain the security systems that control the cash safe and the room it is stored.  

Additionally, there are specific people on property that are authorized to access the safe on a daily basis. The policies and procedures tied to this specific example are only applicable to those users and with the applicability engine, we can make sure this policy content is available to them. This is shown by the blue highlights under property management and in the engineering and maintenance teams. In this example above property management and vendors are not involved in this business function and therefore this policy doesn't apply to them and they don't need to review or interact with this policy in the system. On this slide, we're going to discuss the concept of policy variations. As an example, a hospitality organization has a policy for fire safety requirements. As we examine the real world representation of the physical buildings and locations that are part of this hospitality organization, we know that we have a variety of locations and building characteristics.  

When you pair the reality with local regulations, we start to create a picture where we have subsets of locations that need to have a general fire safety policy in place while also supplemented with additional local regulations that may apply to specific variables. As an example for this organization, we can see that we have 500 properties in the United States, 180 of which are built before or on 1970 and 320 are built after that year. Based on these details, we can create a variation of the original fire safety policy and incorporate the necessary details that pertain to the age of the building itself. Users at the location are given targeted policy content to account for slight variations of a fire safety policy due to when the building was originally constructed. As another example, the same hospitality organization has hotel properties in Europe, and there we have different fire safety regulations based on its location in an urban or rural setting.  

Here we can see how the platform has the ability to create policy content that is specific to a geographic location and another variable in this case, urban versus rural. Finally, we can see how to incorporate city specific fire safety requirements in the country of China. In this example, we can see that we have 50 properties inside the Beijing City limits that are subject specific fire safety regulations, which will give users a variation of a fire safety policy. Properties that fall outside of the city of Beijing are subject to the overall fire safety standards of China integration with Activity Studio. Our policy management module is also integrated with Activity Studio with a combination of policy management and activity studio in one platform organizations can create assign and schedule internal, daily and weekly assessments as well as less frequent inspections or annual and semi-annual audits to assess if policies and procedures are being executed correctly.  

Additionally, we'll show you how locations can apply for waivers for specific policies so that when audited scoring can be adjusted for extenuating circumstances. When you combine all of this together through frequent internal assessments and thorough corporate evaluations, organizations can strengthen their brand standards, gain insights into areas of non-compliance and opportunities, and improve operational execution and performance. Finally, we'll be walking through our latest set of BI reports. These are designed to provide both a detailed overview of key trends as well as the ability to drill in and explore key dimensions. As with all of our reports, users can save their own filtered views for data that is germane to them, subject to daily or weekly alerts and do much, much more. And with that, let's jump into the technology and I'll turn things over to you JT.  

Jeremy Thomas:    

Thanks Matt, and thanks for the introduction. Today we're going to spend a few minutes and really dive into the application and show you how many organizations are utilizing our policy management capabilities for not only their policies, but also for their standards, their procedures and training materials. We'll engage in the technology in two different ways, one from an administrative perspective and two from a user that may be accessing the policies and procedures during their daily evaluations, assessments, audits, or inspections. As you can see, I have two experiences on the screen, the first being in the background and then the second on my tablet in the foreground. We will leverage both to show you how policy capabilities are integrated with the various modules of the system and enable you to use your corporate policies, procedures, and standards as guidance for compliance to those standards. Let's go ahead and get started with the actual administration capabilities.  

As you can see here, I'm signed in as an administrator. I've created a quick link to our policy management capabilities and I've labeled it the resource library. I prefer to use the resource library simply because this particular module enables you to create content that is applicable to many different types of resources. As a user accesses the library, you're going to notice that you have the ability to see only those items that are applicable to you. The ability to search, the ability to drill into your policies, make it easy for you to find and access the information that you're looking for. Let's say that we're looking for information related to food safety. A simple type and a search will pull us the content that contains that information. We can clear our filters to be able to access the information the way that we want to if we want to drill into information for example, as Matt outlined in his introduction, if we want to see all the regulations related to fire and life safety, we can quickly and easily access our policies and procedures related to that information. There's comprehensive search capabilities and the ability for users to filter based on location accessibility and also profile and or permission type accessibility. You'll notice in this particular example that I've got multiple types of policies and procedures in play from our brand policies and procedures to critical control points to asset management and to many others. Let's take a quick look at our information security policy here. This one is built out into multiple sections with each section providing information related to the information for that section. A user can drill down to a specific information and then view the applicable policy with a simple click. As you're going to see here in just a moment, the information related to your policies procedures is easily editable.  

Let's say for example, we're creating a new policy around our asset management. Within that, I can go in and define each individual aspect of the policy. As we drill into the content, users have the ability to see many different areas to assign the appropriate access, rights, applicability, languages, and the content of that particular information. As we edit our content, users have the ability to define the parent policies, the order in which they display in, and then as mentioned by Matt and the team, you can also tag your particular policies as a policy type, individual categories and leverage those tags for things like reporting and other capabilities. Here we can see that we've created the purpose for this particular policy and also the ability to add additional resources that can be used for it to navigate out we simply navigate out and we can access our tree.  

Let's say that we want to look for all HACCP up related policies and procedures. A simple search will bring the HACCP policies and procedures into play as well. When we define the information within the policy, you're also going to be able to see what activities the policies and procedures are found in. On the left hand side, you can see related content that allows us to see what parent relationships we have for this, any child policies and procedures, any variations related policies that are similar and activities that they belong in. If we want to see any of the activities set up in Activity Studio in which a policy is linked to a simple click to the activities, allow us to see that this particular one is in a has HACCP program overview and our demo audit service. In addition to the tree view that we've seen in the policy, library users also have the ability to access a grid view.  

The grid view enables us to quickly and easily sort and search for content and information based on the types, categories and content of the policy. In this particular library, I have multiple types of policies, okay. We have our standard policies, we have procedures. We also have the ability to control content such as training and other materials. To drill into this information, you simply click on the accessible button and you're able to review and make changes to the policies and procedures. In this particular instance, this one happens to be a training type record, and as we get into this, you'll see here that you also have the ability to not only provide the content, but many different additional resources and media types that are available for your users to easily access. Since we're in here and you can see where we've added media types to our policies, I want you to pay close attention to these buttons down at the bottom here.  

If we wish to archive or cancel any policies in which are no longer being used, we can access the red archive button. If we want to create a new version or variation of a policy, we can save as a new version. We can put our policies or records into a draft mode, which will not be available to your end users to be able to view until it's gone through the approval process. And finally, any changes that are made are easily saved through the save button. In addition to being able to filter on the policies, you're going to see a brief summary about each policy as well. If you want to see your parent policies and those that have child records associated to them on the right hand side here, you'll see the children call 'em and have the ability to sort by any of the columns and to identify those that have the records.  

You also are quickly and easily able to identify which policies and procedures, which standards and training material have access to media links and other corresponding resources. If there are particular attributes or policies that have multiple versions, you're able to access that information as well and then drill in to the respective versions on top of that. A user can easily toggle back and forth from one to the other and take advantage of the search capabilities and the predefined filters located at the top. As we can see here with a click of a button, you're able to see all of those that are currently in draft view that we're working on. We can also see here that we have several that have been archived. The tool for the creation of your standards, policies, procedures, and operations has been developed to be simple and easy to use. Along with that, each of the individual policies, procedures, and records that are available in your library are also available to be used as reference tools in Activity Studio.  

I want to take just a few minutes to outline how these policies and other information are also integrated with Activity Studio. Oftentimes, your policies, procedures and standards are used for compliance, and the programs that you create in Activity Studio allow you to measure against those standards for compliance. Sometimes you have particular properties, restaurants, stores, or sites that may request a waiver or be exempt from particular policies. The Policy Management Library allows for organizations that allow waivers. It allows properties to be able to submit waiver requests that can be reviewed and approved by a waiver approval team. From there, when waivers are granted to particular policies, that information is passed down to the mobile applications that are used during the audit inspections and evaluations. On top of that, users that have access rights that are restricted are only able to see the policies, the procedures, and other activities that have been assigned to them.  

Let's take a quick moment and look at this on the right hand side here now you see my tablet. This is a screen share of my iPad. I've already synchronized the information. As you can see, I have multiple items on my calendar that need to be conducted this week. Down below, I also have access to the resource library with a simple click you're going to see that I can see all of the records in that resource library that are applicable to me. The administrative user that we saw a few moments ago had access to roughly 13 different policies and their Associated Child records and information. This particular user who happens to be an engineer, has access to only five. They can access the information the exact same way that it's accessed through the web portal. They can view their standards and procedures as needed. They can view their training materials at any time and access the corresponding resources and other documentation that may have been applied to your policies and standards.  

Also, let's take a look at how those policies and procedures can be linked to the programs and other activities that you're using to measure against that compliance. On the screen here, you see multiple activities that have been assigned to this particular user throughout the week. We'll go ahead and select on one of these activities. This one is a generic activity that allows us to measure things based on food safety, quality service, and cleanliness, and other items that were designated in Activity Studio. You'll also notice here under the food safety section that the policy that's in place currently has a waiver on. A waiver has been requested by this particular location. It was granted by the corporate organization, and now the engineer that's conducting the assessment or the consultant that's conducting the assessment can easily see that a waiver is in place and that can be marked as non-applicable.  

You also at any time have access to the actual policy that's in place as well as corresponding best practice images, other documents, links, photos and videos that may also be associated to it. So each individual policy and standard can be linked to those forms and activities. When the policies and standards are updated through the administration capabilities by those users that have the appropriate permissions, those policies and standards can automatically be updated in any of the forms and activities where those are linked. In the last few minutes here, we're going to share with you how not only the activities or the policies and procedures can be linked to activities through Activity Studio, but we'll also show you the advantage of leveraging the compliance against those standards in our reporting. On my home screen here as an administrator, we have the ability to be able to filter based on any of the standards that are used for activities.  

I have an engagement overview dashboard that allows me to see all of the activities that are being completed over time. This one happens to be broken out by state and geographically, and over time there. If we want to see all the activities that are leveraging our critical control points. Let's go back to one of Matt's examples that he used before in Handwashing. If we wanted to see all of the area are the locations where those checks and that policy is being enforced through measurements, a user has the ability to select and change any standards and search for those standards. In this case, we're looking for critical control point number two, which deals with glove usage and hand washing. We can easily apply that filter to our report or dashboard and then view the information that's available to it. So anywhere that the standard for handwashing and glove use has been used and been measured against is now stored on and showed to the user through the Tableau report.  

Let's show you some other examples of how policies can be used to identify trends. I'm going to access my Tableau and my business intelligence library through my dashboards and analytics. I've got a variety of different reports in my business intelligence library here, and we're going to drill into a dashboard that's going to allow us to identify trends according to those standards. We'll show you two different examples. The first one we're going to look at is our non-compliance trends and opportunities. Here we can see it shows us non-compliance by activity, non-compliance by departments within the forms and activities, non-compliance by policies, sections, standards, and reasons. Once again, we can leverage the filtering capabilities to drill down to the information that we want to specifically see. Let's once again, use our critical control points. We'll look for our glove use and hand washing, apply our filters, and then view all information specific to that filter.  

So for this particular policy, our handwashing and our glove use, we can see where they were compliant. They were non-compliant 20% of the time in our HANDWASHING and non-compliant less than 1% of the time for our glove use. And likewise, it will automatically apply all the filters for the forms and the activities that leverage that policy by department, by section, or by the questions that are being used there. These filters can also move forward to other drill down capabilities as well. For example, you can see the trends and the overall non-compliance in our non-compliance trend report. Once again, we can see where we're having issues with that particular policy and procedure, the areas that we have the most issues, and the questions and non-compliance standards that are leveraging that policy across the board. As you're aware, those of you that are leveraging the application and the CMX platform, you have the ability to establish your views, to reset your settings and filters, and to establish watch criteria for your dashboards.  

The watch criteria allows you to subscribe to the reports. It allows you to set up alerts based on particular measures and ensures that information is distributed to you appropriately when those subscriptions and alerts have been set up and triggered. The resource library capabilities and the policy management capabilities are extremely flexible, Matt and his team continue to add additional features and functionality to this core component of the technology, all given to provide you with the ability to, number one, create and identify your policies, procedures, training materials, and other materials that might be used to measure against throughout your organization. In conjunction with the other modules of Activity Studio, the business intelligence and those other capabilities, the policies integrate to ensure that users have a great experience as they're leveraging it, and all the tools in their tool belts to be able to run and manage their overall program. Hopefully today you had a good insight as to what the policy management capabilities are. We'll continue to improve as we go along and as was mentioned in the beginning, if you do have any more additional questions, feel free to reach out to your customer success teams and to learn more and to gather more information on this. With that being said, I'm going to go ahead and turn it back over to Chris and we can answer any questions that might've come up during the call. Okay, and to wrap up today's webinar. 

Chris Rice:    

Thank you JT. Thanks a lot, Matt, as well. Very, very informative stuff. Lots of great capabilities there that we've shown off, so very proud of this release that's coming up. We, as JT said, we have big plans for this module and the capabilities that we offer. Two of the big items that we're working on, we don't yet have definitive timeframes for, but big capability gaps or opportunities that we're looking to close. First likely tackling publishing workflows, so having pretty expansive policy review capabilities when you have big teams internally that are collaborating on the content itself, and you want to have certain controls in place from a workflow standpoint, even offering different departments, different workflows and numbers of reviewers and who's reviewing them. That'll be probably something we're targeting shortly here, and then we'll get into doing more actual workflow with end users in terms of acknowledgement, signing off on policies, things like that, so how do you activate and make sure everybody's aware of these policies and they've signed off that they're acknowledging them, which will be great in addition to all the Activity Studio integration and the BI stuff that JT showed off. So yeah, as JT said, please reach out to me. I'd love to hear any ideas, opportunities, concerns, anything that you've seen that jumped out at you today, and also the custom sales teams. And with that, I will give everybody back some of their lives about 20 minutes from our scheduled hour. So thanks so much everybody. Have a great day and great holiday season.