
How LightEdge turned a spreadsheet-dependent compliance program into one the whole company uses
At Lightedge, Shelby Eckard's days look like what you'd expect from a GRC lead at a fast-growing company: new vendors to vet, new customers with compliance requirements, and new systems coming in through every acquisition. The problem wasn't the volume. It was where everything lived.
The compliance program ran on Excel. That meant vendor status, audit evidence, risk tracking, and review history all existed in workbooks that only Shelby's team could navigate. When operations needed to know whether a vendor had been vetted, they had to ask. When finance or security had input on a vendor review, they fed it in through email. When an audit came around, the team spent days manually pulling evidence from disconnected systems.
Cross-functional work wasn't really cross-functional; it was Shelby's team acting as the connective tissue between everyone else, manually. The deeper problem was trajectory. LightEdge was growing. The compliance program wasn't keeping up.
"We were living out of Excel sheets, it's burdensome and I could not wait to get out of there, but it's also not scalable. As LightEdge was growing, our compliance tracking and reporting mechanisms were not growing at the same speed."
What Lightedge needed was a platform the whole company could actually use, not just a better tool for her team to manage in isolation.
LightEdge adopted Complyance, starting with vendor management and building from there. The first shift was visibility. Operations teams could check vendor status themselves, in real time, without routing requests through Shelby. Finance, security, and operations got pulled into reviews through automated workflows and task assignments rather than email threads. The approval process stopped living in someone's inbox.
From there, Shelby's team kept finding things worth consolidating. Vendors got invited directly into the platform to answer technical questions, cutting back-and-forth while keeping the process under Shelby's control. Then came a steady stream of manual workflows that moved off spreadsheets and into the platform.
OFI and non-conformity tracking now has a shared status visible across the team at all times. User access reviews run through Complyance instead of a recurring manual process. Business impact analysis documentation lives in one place. Internal audit prep is being built directly into existing workflows rather than treated as a separate sprint.
Shelby has a simple rule for what belongs on the platform: if completing one task means opening three spreadsheets or visiting three systems, it gets consolidated.
"There's nothing worse than something coming up and you had no idea about it. Complyance at least helps make that less of a thing."
LightEdge moved from a compliance program held together by spreadsheets and email to one built on shared workflows and real cross-functional visibility. Shelby's team spends less time maintaining files and more time doing the work that actually reduces risk.
The cultural shift matters too. Compliance is no longer something that sits with one team and gets handed to everyone else at audit time. Operations, finance, and security are part of the process now: which means fewer gaps, fewer surprises, and fewer days spent reconstructing evidence that should have been organized all along.
What's next? Finishing the integration of internal audit workflows, expanding best practice monitoring beyond existing frameworks, and continuing to find manual processes worth bringing into the platform. "Everything is growing," Shelby says, "and we want to grow with it."
Self-serve visibility across the business
Five manual processes taken off spreadsheets
Less time maintaining files, more time reducing risk
Audit prep is no longer a separate sprint handed to one team at year-end
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