How CloudTamers Automated Policy Management — Saving 300+ Hours on Customer Audits & Due Diligence

After preparing for one customer audit took 300+ hours, CloudTamers knew there had to be a more efficient way to manage their company policies.

Background:

CloudTamers is one of the UK's longest standing Oracle NetSuite partners. They build and sell SuiteApps, and offer NetSuite consultancy, implementations, and support to their customers. With a team of ~ 20, they regularly work with organisations many times their size: enterprise customers who have adopted, or are in the process of adopting, Oracle NetSuite. Enterprise customers are increasingly expecting enterprise-grade compliance, regardless of the size of the company supplying them. Like most companies their size, CloudTamers had no legal obligation to run a formal policy management process, so their focus went where it should: focusing on their customers and their products. Policies existed. The processes behind their management was informal and manual.

Problem:

Then, several things changed at once, putting stress on their informal policy management process and team:

1. Procurement teams started adding policy management questions to RFIs; increasingly wanting details on how those policies were managed and communicated to staff.
2. Prospects started asking for ISO 27001 certification, or proof that similarly detailed policies and procedures were in place: Being covered by Oracle NetSuite's certification was good, but prospects wanted extra assurance: proof that CloudTamers' own policies, particularly around data handling, were robust.
3. Finally, and most crucially, one of their largest customers rolled out a vendor risk management programme, complete with regular on-site audits of their suppliers. Specifically, they wanted to see evidence that policies were updated regularly and on a schedule, with records of what changed between versions, and proof that these policies were communicated to staff. Without an in-house compliance team or a policy management tool, pulling together that evidence took 300+ hours.

The audit preparations alone took 300+ hours. Policies had to be tracked down across SharePoint, updated, and their version history assembled from memory into a spreadsheet. Then sent to the team by email, one by one, with every acknowledgment logged in a second spreadsheet, by hand. They passed the customer audit and continued to win new business. But it was clear they needed a faster process, one that gave their customers the tamper-proof, timestamped evidence of policy management they were asking for. And their team needed to return to fee-earning and strategic projects, not email chasers and data entry. Existing customers started setting up supplier compliance portals: Some requested just copies of CloudTamers' company policies; others went further and asked for new versions to be re-uploaded annually.

Solution:

CloudTamers migrated their policies and procedures onto Dayspring's platform. Audit preparation that used to take 300+ hours now takes between 5–10 hours, a 97% reduction in team time spent on policy management. Here's what changed:

Want to save time building evidence that your policies are actively managed and communicated? Watch a short product demo, or contact us to find out more.