Find the Right GRC Software Solution for Your Business Needs

Buying GRC Software for your Business?

GRC software (Governance risk management and compliance software) is considered a single source of truth throughout most businesses' decision-making processes. It is a means for publicly-held enterprises to manage IT-related operations that require regulation and ensure they are meeting compliance and risk standards. The right tool can help you identify risks and opportunities, manage complex processes, delegate tasks, automate workflows, and capture data for business applications. When used in the right manner, it can help your quality control and compliance teams evaluate your firm's compliance and performance.

It will allow your business to reduce the cost of poor quality, embrace continuous improvement, and increase customer satisfaction rates. However, not all GRC solutions are created equal, and choosing the right one will determine how effective it can be in running your business. In fact, modern GRC tools tend to be so differentiated that there are options that are created for specific businesses.

At Olive, we believe in leading with our business needs. Here is how to pick the ideal solution for your business:

Assess Why You Need GRC Software

GRC software will do much more than keep you compliant to standards like the ISO and HIPAA. As such, you ought to identify why your business needs to invest in the tool. One of the easiest ways to do so is to use a User Requirements Specification (URS), which is a list of features and your employees and stakeholders might be interested in. You can easily find a template of a URS online.

The template should help you establish your business’ pain points, and all processes that work and those that don't. Some of the features your business might need should help you with:

• Risk management
• Audits
• APIs and integration
• Document and policy management
• KPI setting and management
• Supplier management
• Maintaining training records

What Software Features Are You Willing To Spend On?

The pricing of GRC software differs from one vendor to the other. Understanding a vendor's pricing system will help you pick a solution that will give you optimal ROI without stretching your budget excessively. Most vendors will include a variety of items in their pricing model, including:

• End users
• Hosting
• Implementation costs
• Differentiated modules
• Support and maintenance
• Training costs
• Administrator licenses

Ideally, you should set a specific budget for the solution you want and stick to it. Calculate the solution's overall price over five years to ensure that it will be in line with your budget. However, your budget ought to be a realistic one- a budget of $50 per year might not offer you all the features your business deserves.

When starting out, list at least three goals that the software should fulfill, you could want it to roll out across the entire organization or offer the option of free end-users. Other businesses could also prefer a solution that suppliers can access.

How Easy Will Integrating It Into Your Current Tech Stack Be?

GRC tools are intended to be used by non-tech-savvy team members. As such, they need to be user-friendly enough for your entire team. Your ideal tool should integrate well with your existing systems with little friction.

The ideal solution should also be scalable enough to keep up with business changes. For instance, if you were to expand your team, it should allow you to easily add new users. Since regulations change from time to time, it needs to help you keep up with the dynamic nature of your compliance environment.

How Much Customization Is Allowed?

Out of the box, most GRC tools might be ready to use. For most small and medium-sized businesses, they can offer turnkey solutions to their problems. However, some complex problems might be unique to your business. As such, investing in customizable GRC software can be quite helpful. This will allow you to tweak specific parts of the software's functionality or even brand it to represent your business' identity.

Will Your Workforce Receive Training?

Most GRC tools tend to be easy to use. Employees can learn their way around them with little to no friction. Some companies do provide training videos and tutorials to walk users through the rather complex parts of the tools.

However, some parts might require more interactive training sessions to understand. While most large vendors will offer full training, smaller providers might not- though you pay less for the product. Assess whether your business will need any training before opting for a specific solution. You should also ask potential vendors whether you might need to pay extra for full training.

Look For Online Reviews

Lastly, you need to ensure that all the promises that your vendor makes will actually get fulfilled. You can spend time reading online reviews on the vendor and their services, but avoid limiting yourself by only looking at online reviews. No matter how confident the review are, they do not know your individual needs and cannot speak for you. 

Once you are done picking the ideal software, the next step is to build on user buy-in. You need to carefully launch and integrate the tools into your daily operations to ensure that there are little hiccups during implementation. If you need any help or advice with implementation, be sure to consult your GRC software vendor.

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Finding the Best GRC Software Solution for Your Business’s Needs can be an Efficient and Collaborative Process.

Olive takes the best process for finding the software you need, and makes it easy for you to collaborate with your stakeholders to identify and rank your requirements. With Olive, you can anonymously review all the GRC platforms and integrations available in the space, within the context of how these GRC platforms meet your evolving business needs. Olive takes this long list of vendors and boils it down to a shortlist that is assured to meet your needs. Searching for CRM reviews on Capterra or G2Crowd, can deliver biased results, but with Olive, we don’t charge vendors, so you can be confident that there is no bias on the shortlist.

With Olive, you can check out various project requirements ahead of time and easily filter out vendors based on these requirements. Easily filter out vendors who don’t meet your needs, and ensure the GRC software solution you choose addresses al your specific business concerns. 

With Olive, you can make better decisions faster. Interested in a free demo? Sign up today!