When I joined Cleveland-based MobilityWorks as director of risk and compliance in March 2022, one of the first things I did was to ask what system our compliance professionals were using to maintain and renew the regulatory requirements to stay open for business.
About the author
Erik Ingersoll is director of risk and compliance at Inc. 500 company MobilityWorks and its sister company Driverge Vehicle Innovations. He is based out of Londonderry, N.H.
Prior to MobilityWorks, he held several management roles overseeing safety and risk for Hertz Global Holdings. He earned his Bachelor of Science from Northeastern University and a Juris Doctor from Massachusetts School of Law. Erik is also a Certified Safety Professional. He can be contacted here.
I found our compliance people were doing their best but struggling to keep tabs on an expanding number of licenses and renew them in a timely way. With more than 90 locations, MobilityWorks offers the United States’ largest selection of wheelchair accessible vehicles and adaptive solutions.
My team told me the system they used was a manual one, including notebooks and reams of lists and due dates. I challenged my team to research different methods to help automate the department’s work and improve outcomes. After evaluating three to five software platforms, we chose a software as a service-based compliance system that tracks all our licenses and more.
An ‘everything tool’ for compliance
The software platform we settled on is open from the moment I turn on my computer in the morning until I log off for the day. It is an “everything tool” for us. For our retail customers, we operate dealerships requiring business licenses to offer service and repairs, and we need valid bonds in place among other requirements.
Our compliance system, called Sectyr LicenseTrak, is flexible and expansive. Our team needed an automated solution to keep abreast of licenses issued by the 35 states where we conduct business as MobilityWorks or through our Driverge Vehicle Innovations brand, which upfits commercial wheelchair accessible vans, shuttles, and small buses. A third part of our business—branded as MobilityWorks@Home—delivers home accessible solutions, like stair lifts and ramps, for homeowners.
There are local departments of motor vehicles, secretaries of state, and insurance agents—just to name a few entities—that we interact with to keep licenses and certificates on file and valid. With an automated process, we can quickly add categories that reflect the way our company does business. We don’t have to bend our processes to fit the software or ask for costly modifications to the product. In short order, the automated process helped modernize our risk and compliance group.
By turning to compliance software instead of a manual process, we have the flexibility to get very granular, which we need because we have different licenses for each business unit in a geographic market. We might want to search for a subset of one or the other, and the complexity of storing and tracking all this would just grow and grow without a digitized method.
By eliminating spreadsheets, notebooks, and whiteboards, we can automatically delineate which items need attention in each market and location, and we get alerts through the system describing each license and the specific requirements for renewal. Cross-training between compliance analysts is easy because we can electronically share information and lessons learned among staff.
We’ve also centralized how we monitor our company’s information with a digital dashboard that color codes the status of risk and compliance tasks. Instead of information residing between each team member’s ears, we have a central location for compliance. And we get alerts on overdue items and sort anything due beyond a set date. As a manager, I’m able to see my team’s notes and their initials on license renewals they are managing in a secure document library, which only the compliance team can open. In the library, we also keep details about regulatory agencies and contact information for officers.
Quieting the storm
Before automating our process, there was a daily barrage of emails from across our company to our department asking about the status or whereabouts of licenses and certificates. Emails would also come from state and local agencies about license renewals. But those alerts could land in junk folders and go unnoticed, causing a document to expire.
In one state, prior to implementing our compliance software, a MobilityWorks dealership’s general manager frantically called me late on a Friday saying a regulatory official was at the door because the business’s dealer license had expired. After much scrambling, we averted the crisis.
Automating our process allowed us to easily handle that dealership’s renewal the following year. Before anything expired, we had an alert from our compliance software, renewed the license, and sent the documentation to the appropriate authorities.
Automation enables me, my team, our dealerships, and our specially trained certified mobility consultants to serve our clients without interruption. The sign we’re doing a good job in compliance is that nobody is having a conversation about us, and that hasn’t always been the case. Now, we couldn’t imagine doing our jobs without a system that automates, centralizes, and digitizes our compliance work for our dealerships.
