Introduction

In this post we will be briefly discussing the foundations of Compliance Management for road transportation in Australia, hopefully you will find this article useful when thinking about your approach to compliance management.

What does compliance mean?

To me compliance means ensuring that business processes and operating practices are in accordance with a prescribed or agreed set of standards. Compliance requirements for heavy vehicle operations are prescribed by law (WHS, HVNL, Road Rules, and Road Transportation Law) or found in industry accreditation standards (NHVAS) as well as industry codes of practice (The Master Code).

Compliance requirements may also be found within contracts between business and customers or external (contractor) heavy vehicle operators, in some cases a business may also set other strategically determined standards, for example, self-imposed speed limits for their vehicles.

The consequences, to a business, of failing to comply with laws, regulations, and standards can be extreme - including business disruption, loss of reputation, fines and in some cases the risk of imprisonment.

What is Compliance Management?

Compliance Management is the process by which we plan, organise, control, and lead activities to ensure compliance with prescribed and/or agreed standards.

Compliance management process can include:

• Developing and implementing policies and procedures to ensure compliance
• Monitoring and generating exceptions when requirements are not met
• Preparing reports and providing supporting documentation
• Inspections and reviews
• Internal audits
• Third-party audits

Compliance Management is an enabler of the due diligence (governance) process required to be undertaken by business managers, and forms part of the overall self-regulation framework of a transport business or other operation.

A compliant business is a safe business

A good compliance management program based on driver / supervisor competency, a transparent exception management program, and independent compliance processes ensures that when non-compliance events occur that they are detected quickly and corrected in a timely manner.

By instilling this type of compliance discipline across the operations often the the discipline flows over into other parts of the safety management system, for example, drivers completing TAKE 5s or reporting hazards and incidents.

Being compliant and proving it

When operating on the road network the environment is very difficult to control and often the safety of the heavy vehicle driver is reliant on the competency and alertness of other road users, this means that even the most compliant and safe businesses may be involved in incidents.

When an incident occurs, you need to be able to produce a documented compliance management system and a documented safety management system (to be discussed in a future post).

Documenting a compliance management system does not need to be overly complex and you can find free compliance templates online:

• HVNL Compliance Management templates
• Chain of Responsibility Policy templates

These templates should be adapted to your business in a way that the business will actually adhere to (HVNL Support can assist you in this process).

Once the compliance management system is implemented, it should generate records of compliance with the management system, records may include:

• driver / supervisor / administrator training records
• driver / supervisor / administrator verification of competency records
• audits of work diary pages
• warning letters issued to drivers
• breach of contract notices issued to contractors,
• investigations for “false” fatigue or speed events generated by a telematics system etc.

While this list is not exhaustive it should give you an idea of the volume of records that your compliance management systems should be generating.

Conclusion

Compliance Management is a cooperative effort between operations, administration and management and is one of those things that a lot people do not enjoy, however, if you integrate compliance as a daily process it can become "just the way we do business" and in my opinion the effort is well worth it.

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