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Compliance and permit tracking systems

Rules that change by jurisdiction are the most expensive kind of knowledge to keep in someone's head. We capture them once, put them in a database, and let the system enforce them instead of a person remembering them.

Between us we hold permit and bylaw rules for a national footprint in a single system, and document field sites against safety regulation and owner requirements. Different industries, identical problem.

01 / The problem

The rule no one remembered is the one that costs you.

Every regulated operation runs on knowledge held by a few people. This city wants the application ten days ahead. That one caps you at four permits a year. This one requires black and white artwork with a twenty inch letter limit. That certificate expires in March and the job it covers runs to June.

It works until the person who knows leaves, or until you operate in eighty jurisdictions instead of eight. Then the failures start, and they're the expensive kind: work stopped on site, a permit refused after the crew arrived, a renewal missed and a contract in breach, an audit that can't produce the evidence it needs.

None of it's difficult to know. It's difficult to remember, at the right moment, across hundreds of live cases, forever. That's a software problem, not a discipline problem, and treating it as a discipline problem is why it keeps happening.

02 / What we do

Everything this covers.

The rules database

  • Every jurisdiction's requirements captured in one place
  • Submission method, fee and fee basis
  • Lead times and renewal triggers
  • Annual caps and maximum days per year
  • Required gaps between placements or applications
  • Allowed and prohibited products, formats or configurations

Enforced, not remembered

  • Work blocked until the approval exists
  • Lead time deadlines counted backwards from the install or start date
  • Caps, blackout periods and gap rules applied automatically
  • Variant routing where a jurisdiction has artwork or format requirements
  • Leeway rules captured where the regulation allows them

Expiries and renewals

  • Permits, licences, certificates and insurance tracked to a date
  • Escalation before something lapses, instead of a report after it did
  • Renewal triggers tied to the work that depends on them
  • One view of everything expiring in the next ninety days

Audit and evidence

  • Inspections, incident reports and training records tied to the exact site, job or asset
  • Proof of completion attached to the record it belongs to
  • Evidence packs assembled from the records you already keep
  • Documentation that survives a change of supervisor or project phase

Keeping up

  • Flagging when a rule changes, and which live work it affects
  • Newly restricted jurisdictions surfaced before you quote them
  • A record of who changed a rule, when, and why
03 / How it works

The order we do it in.

01

Collect

We go to the source. The bylaw, the regulation, the actual portal, and the people who phone the office every day. Not what a summary says the rule is.

02

Model

The rules turned into fields a system can act on. A lead time becomes a number of days, not a sentence. A cap becomes a count. An exception becomes a condition.

03

Enforce

Built into the workflow so the wrong thing can't be done, instead of reported after it already was. Blocking beats reporting every time.

04

Maintain

A process for capturing changes, because regulation moves and a stale rules database is more dangerous than no database at all.

04 / Fit

Who this is for.

A good fit

  • Operations working across many municipalities, provinces or states
  • Contractors facing COR audits and owner prequalification
  • Anyone tracking permits, licences or certifications on a spreadsheet
  • Companies where a missed renewal stops work or breaches a contract
  • Field operations that have to prove what was done and where
  • Businesses expanding into a new province or state
05 / Questions

What people ask about this.

We track this in a spreadsheet. Why change?
A spreadsheet reports after the fact. It can't stop someone booking work in a city that's capped out, or scheduling an install inside the lead time. The value isn't the list, it's the block. Once the rules sit in the workflow, the wrong thing stops being possible instead of being caught later by whoever happens to look.
Does this replace our existing system?
Usually it sits alongside it. Most operations already have a booking, dispatch or job system that handles everything except the rules. We add the rules layer and wire it into what you run, instead of asking you to migrate. Where the existing system can't be extended, we say so early.
How many jurisdictions is too many for a spreadsheet?
In practice, more than about a dozen, or any number at all once the rules differ in kind instead of just in fee. Two cities with different fees are a spreadsheet problem. Two cities with different submission methods, caps, lead times and artwork rules are a database problem, and the second case arrives sooner than people expect.
06 / Related

The work next door.

These almost always come up together. An audit that finds a process problem usually finds a data problem underneath it.

Start here

Start with the audit.

Every business is different, so we scope the audit that way. We spend time inside your operation and watch the work actually happen. You get a written map of every valley, what it costs you a year, and what it would take to flatten it. That document is yours whether or not we build anything.

Emailadaignault@peaksnvalleysconsulting.com
Phone(250) 423-9511
FoundersKamila Domanska · Alex Daignault
Based inNelson, British Columbia
ServingCanada and the United States