Nov. 27, 2006

Overall, compliance regulation has a fairly big impact on most industries, particularly on B2B conducted in the United States. There are more than twenty different types of regulations, both industry-specific (particularly in healthcare, financial services and R&D) and otherwise (Sarbanes-Oxley) which impacts all public companies) and for which corporations need to train all their employees.

Now a new website, ComplianceOnline, offers a faster and simpler way for B2B companies to re-evaluate their specific compliance training requirements. ComplianceOnline offers Web-based courses led by subject matter experts and targeted to specific needs. For example, here are two of the most popular courses on the site:

1) Validation and Use of Excel Spreadsheets in FDA Regulated Environments, by Dr. Ludwig Heber.

2) How to Do an Effective Hazard Analysis to Meet FDA and Risk Management Requirements, by Robert DiNitto.

Whether in academia or business, it isn't often that you can pay so little for direct instruction from experts. Dr. Heber happens to be the Compliance Program Manager at Agilent, while DiNitto is a founder and principal of medical tech consulting firm AlvaMed.

The ComplianceOnline model is to present the widest possible range of classes and let students choose their own learning path. The ComplianceOnline catalog features hundreds of courses across the main categories of FDA Regulation, High-Tech, Sarbanes-Oxley, Discrete Manufacturing, Process Manufacturing, Financial Services, Construction, and ISO Published Standards.

The ComplianceOnline portal is owned by software company MetricStream, which provides compliance and risk products. MetricStream's functionality is focused on the higher-level governance, controls, and tracking functionality needed for compliance, while ComplianceOnline serves the human learning need implicit in any compliance initiative.

MetricStream recently partnered with NASDAQ to co-market MetricStream products and the ComplianceOnline portal to NASDAQ members.

Source: Line 56