Integrated Change Management Unit

Abstract

An integrated system for managing changes in regulatory and non-regulatory requirements for business activities at an industrial or commercial facility. Application of this system to environmental, health and safety activities, and to food, drug, cosmetic, and medical treatment and device activities, are discussed as examples. The system: provides one or more databases that contain information on operations and requirements concerning an activity or area of business; receives information on regulatory and non-regulatory changes that affect operations of the business; converts these changes into changes in data entry forms, data processing and analysis procedures, and presentation (by printing, electronic display and / or distribution) of data processing and analysis results to selected recipients, without requiring the services of one or more programmers to re-key and / or reformat the items affected by the change; and implements receipt of change information and dissemination of data processing and analysis results using the facilities of the Internet.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]This invention relates to the integrated management of information affected by regulatory changes, such as changes in environmental, health and safety laws, and non-regulatory changes.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Control of industrial and commercial activities by means of federal, state and local laws, statutes, ordinances and regulations (“regulations” herein) is endemic in the United States. Examples of activities that are regulated by such regulations include: environmental health and safety (“EH&S”; Titles 7, 10, 29, 30, 40, 42 and 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations and related state and local codes); administrative procedures applicable to government personnel (Title 5); agricultural activities (Titles 7 and 9); creation, use, treatment and disposal of nuclear materials (Title 10); conversion and distribution of usable forms of energy, power and water (Titles 10 and 18); banking, financial and securities activities and foreign trade (Titles 12...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

These laws often have overlapping jurisdiction and are not always consistent with one another.

Although these additions were intended to stimulate compliance via market-based vehicles (like emission allowance futures trading), these permits have not, as yet, been broadly implemented.

Various attempts have been made to manage regulatory compliance, but no solution has been developed before that provides a comprehensive, integrated framework for (1) absorbing business changes into the application and database without affecting the integrity of the system, (2) automatically making application and database changes using intelligent agent routines, (3) managing technical and business content-related functionality using metadata tables rather than relying on traditional programming methods.

Other workers have created regulations databases, document management systems and other partial solutions for tracking changes in, and compliance with, regulations and similar requirements, but these partial solutions have not addressed the effects of change across an integrated database application or across an integrated framework of technical functions.

These partial solutions also do not provide a “closed loop” approach to identifying changes using intelligent network agents, recommending modifications to the business content, and automatically effecting modifications in the system without the use of programmers and / or programming.

One recurring problem with any database that frequently changes is maintenance of the database as current.

This approach is not cost effective and, in effect, mortgages the database maintainer's future.

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