NERC CIP Compliance Management

According to NERC’s Annual CMEP Report, beginning July 1st, 2009, Regional Entities will be directed to conduct spot checks on registered entities subject to CIP-002 thru CIP-009, which is when these requirements reach the Auditably Compliant stage.

An effective NERC CIP Compliance Solution includes not only the compliance policies, processes, and procedures to meet the defined standards, but where your company stands with the implementation of these items, what standards are addressed by each item, and a methodology for managing all of the necessary documentation required to provide the evidentiary proof that your company is following all the policies, processes, and procedures put in place. It enables senior management to monitor the effectiveness of the compliance program. The solution not only shows the relationships of the standards to the implemented policies, processes, and procedures, but also provides easy retrieval of the required evidentiary document to support your claims of compliance.

While many of the components can be manually tracked, cross-referenced, and maintained, this often creates an administrative nightmare for many companies to maintain. Tracking forms and instructions, and, where appropriate, directions for routing, review, retention, and destruction of the transaction forms can create significant overhead on even the smallest of organizations. AssurX, Inc. provides a complete solution that includes software and services that meet all of these needs.

Our defined solution is built on a secure, scalable system with built-in audit trail and electronic signatures. You can easily automate the forms creation and processing, and manage the evidentiary documentation required to support your company’s compliance to the NERC CIP standards.

AssurX, Inc.’s CATSWeb is a mature compliance management system with built-in audit trail and electronic signature functionality stringent enough to meet the rigorous requirements established by NERC CIP. Many customers have already implemented CATSWeb ER to manage standards, document their basis for compliance and track their mitigation and compliance activities.

This software solution enables companies to:

• Document and coordinate compliance plans and activities required to achieve full compliance with the NERC CIP standards.
• Manage and report on requirements, measures, levels of compliance, and
  risk factors for one or all of your registered entities.
• Create, process, and track execution of processes by automating your
  workflows, and ensuring their execution is completed and approved by
  appropriate parties automatic email notification.

While there are certainly many software solutions that can provide similar capabilities, only CATSWeb provides:

• Rapid deployment through easy point and click configuration of workflows, fields, forms, rules, lists, signatures, etc. No programming is required and this significantly reduces the time to automate processes.
• Point and click administration (forms design, signature workflow, escalation rules, etc.) eliminates the need for re-validation as the system is enhanced.
• Sophisticated access restrictions with built-in audit trails including both record level and field level can be based on groups, departments, personalities and/or employees allowing you to limit who can view or edit records.

Cost-effective extensibility through an open architecture that allows advanced custom configurations (event hooks, connectivity to other databases) that do not change CATSWeb core code. The open integration interface enables the ability to integrate with any existing information system or database. Drill down links can easily be added to forms created in CATSWeb to easily retrieve data and display data from other systems if needed. With no core code modifications, upgrades are seamless.

• Easy to use ad-hoc query tool for creating, saving, and exporting data.
• Comes loaded with approved NERC standards.

The open architecture also provides the ability to easily integrate with your company’s existing Document Management System (e.g., Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Filenet Content Management).

If you don’t have an existing Document Management System or don’t want to use it for compliance management document control, CATSWeb can provide the document control and effective management of the lifecycle for changes to those documents.