GDPR Compliance within your Contracts Management System

In two months the new General Data Protection Regulations will go live, and it will be having a massive impact on how you choose your suppliers and manage your contracts. Now is the time to ensure your systems and processes will remain compliant with upcoming regulations.

Under the new legislation, technical and organisation measure must be taken to minimise the processing of personal data. This means from the very start of trying to gain control of data, data protection needs to be engrained in all aspects of the system and process.

What your company must do and how a Contract Management System can help your procurement team:

• Communication

To protect the right of people that give you their data, your organisation needs to communicate with plain language; who you are, why you are using the data, how long it will be stored for and who receives it.

A Contracts Management System can enable your procurement to ensure all the criteria can be easily communicated with your database, through automated email, that answer all the criteria – by making it part of your systems process when you add a new contact. The automation of data in your Contracts Management System is the key to effectively and efficiently communicating.

• Consent

Organisations need to ensure they are gaining clear consent to process the data.

As part of your Contract Management process, the system can enable you to have check boxes and upload document attachments to ensure the data for consent is collected, recorded and stored in a secure platform, against each contract, and/or supplier.

• Access and Safeguarding Sensitive Data

GDPR Is ensuring people have protection on their data. Companies must let people access their own data and have the option to give it to another company.

Unlike the usual spreadsheet that is used by Procurement teams, a Contracts Management System can enable the team to build data protection safeguards. Every Contracts Management System should ensure there is data protection on sensitive databases by providing a login access platform and providing the tools such as, defined user permissions to govern and control.

• Warnings

It is important for organisation to inform people of data breaches and if there is a serious risk to them.

A Contracts Management System will help you not miss a thing when it comes to your contracts and supplier data. With a system, you can incorporate alerts and escalations to notify your team and other to mater requiring urgent attention either via homepage notice, email or SMS.

Our Accord Contract Management System helps with GDPR compliance from storing your data in a secure hosting environment under ISO27001 Accreditation behind Enterprise Class firewalls. With clear User Permissions you’ll know your data is secure and who has access to it.

Accord is enabling organisations to ensure there is secure data protection on sensitive customer, contract and supplier data. Efficiently managing your data; the contract management system provides you with the tools to govern and control with a high degree of automation to remain compliant.

Abi MacGregor, Procurement Manager: “The team at Target have improved our procurement process and helped us save a great deal of time through automating our contracts information management, which has resulted in better utilisation of our team.”

GDPR applies to all organisations that handle, store and process personal data. There is no limitation on business size or geographical location, even businesses outside of the EEA (European Economic Area) will need to comply if they are processing the personal data of any EU citizen or resident.

For more information: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/infographic/2017/index_en.htm

Or contact us to see how our Accord Contracts Management System could help your procurement team protect data and remain complaint.