Regulatory audits and non-compliance events cost U.S. companies an average of $9,991 per incident, with costs rising significantly in highly-regulated industries.
When looking at manufacturing, for example, those costs are nearly doubled to an average of $19,564 per incident. Small manufacturers with 50 employees or less spend up to 2.5 times more than large manufacturers.
Across all industries, U.S. companies spend an average of $5.47 million on compliance annually.
“Organizations often believe that they are unable to afford the necessary steps to meet heightened compliance standards set forth,” explains Peter Merkulov of Corporate Compliance Insights. “Yet, a recent study from Ponemon and Globalscape reports that it is 2.71 times more costly for an organization to not comply with mandates.”
“The average cost of compliance is $5.47 million versus an average of $14.82 million for noncompliance, which is an average difference of $9.35 million annually.”
Being able to demonstrate not only the accuracy of your training content, but also quickly provide thorough, accurate documentation around the creation, updating, and consumption of that content, can lead to a huge savings in time, cost and frustration when a regulatory audit occurs.
Lack of documentation and poor documentation practices are major red flags during regulatory audits—technology platforms like Xyleme’s CCMS make it easy to generate comprehensive reports on content update, version, and access histories. It also allows content teams to lock down certain pieces of content to prevent unauthorized persons from making changes, creating a huge time savings for Quality Assurance teams.
