Case study

UKAD streamlines policy management with Xoralia

• Dan Hawtrey
• 13 August 2025

UKAD is a government arms-length body (ALB) tasked with protecting and educating around clean sport in the UK.  

UKAD’s 80 employees, and an additional field workforce of 300 Doping Control Officers (DCOs), make a critical contribution to both elite and grass-roots sport in the UK.

UKAD takes a three-pronged approach to protecting clean sport. We carry out education at the grassroots level about the risk of drugs use and its negative effects to drive prevention. Our operational side involves drug testing while our legal side is the final stage of catching drugs cheats.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

A critical reliance on policies and procedures

UKAD’s success relies on watertight policies and procedures.

There is so much policy and procedure to follow. Everything has to be done precisely and strictly because sometimes it ends in a legal case. If procedures aren’t followed, we have a problem."

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

UKAD is also an ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified organisation so policies and procedures must be up to date and easily accessible. Procedures that impact information security must also be followed.

Our line of work is very sensitive and involves a lot of personal details and information. Information security is one of our top priorities when we're looking at quality assurance.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

Challenge: Policy reviews delays and bottlenecks

As the business owner of UKAD’s quality system, one of Sam Khogali’s main headaches has been getting policies quickly reviewed by UKAD’s directors, an essential step in the policy management process.

UKAD’s directors are always very busy and even attempts to get policies reviewed in a weekly director’s team meeting have proved difficult. This has meant that important policies have frequently been delayed by review bottlenecks and endless email chains.

We wanted a way to streamline the policy review process and avoid all that emailing backwards and forwards. We wanted to get to a point where myself as administrator knows exactly at which stage of the lifecycle each policy is at.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

Wasting valuable time

Khogali was also looking to find a policy management solution where automation could reduce time wasted on manual administration.

We wanted to automate reminders. I kept having to reach out to people to tell them that they need to review, update or send out things. I wasn’t able to focus on continual improvement with so much time taken up with reminders and nudges.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

Seamless integration with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint

The team decided to act. Having rejected the idea of building their own solution in-house, the team established a business case for acquiring a product that would transform the policy review process and free up time through automation. Any solution also needed to be easy to use and competitively priced.

One of the reasons Xoralia stood out was that it not only met UKAD’s functional requirements but also integrated effortlessly with SharePoint and UKAD’s Microsoft 365-powered digital workplace.  

This not only meant users had seamless access to Xoralia, but it also reduced risk around the implementation.

Having Xoralia linked with SharePoint was one of the biggest things for us. In terms of migrating files there was no data risk in having to bring everything from one place across to another. Any existing documents could stay in their SharePoint library.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

Transforming policy reviews workflows

Perhaps the most impactful feature of Xoralia is the ability to set up review and approval workflows for new and existing policies.

Stakeholders in the process now get automated reminders and personalised views of what they need to do and when, while Khogali as administrator can instantly check on the status. No more policy reviews getting stuck in endless email threads.  

Here, the flexibility of Xoralia and integration with Microsoft 365 have been key.

It was so useful that we were able to build custom workflows using Power Automate for different types of policies and for different teams. Everything was sent to the right people.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

The custom workflows have been particularly welcome for policy reviewers who only have to use the system very infrequently.

It's very easy for people to forget the process who then end up reaching out to me. With these custom workflows, we were able to say to people to just follow the process within Xoralia, it'll take you to the stages you need to for specific documents. That was really useful for us.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

Moving the needle on adoption and engagement

An immediate outcome from Xoralia has been better engagement and increased adoption from policy approvers and reviewers, simply through introducing automation and establishing transparency.

More policies are getting reviewed in the first instance just through the reminders. We've seen a massive uptick in people engaging with their policy reviews and the overall process.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

Changing perceptions of policy management for the better

One surprising outcome from using Xoralia has even been a shift in how staff perceive policy management, an activity many regarded as painful and potentially time-consuming.

Policy management had become this invisible task that people worried about and didn't know how much time and effort they had to put in. Now the visibility and transparency that Xoralia provides has reduced a lot of anxiety on our staff. Everybody can see exactly what they need to do and when around policy reviews and approvals.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

A system that is so easy to use

Some of this shift in views can also be attributed to Xoralia’s ease of use.

The general feedback has been people really enjoy using Xoralia. It's a lot easier and smoother and makes sense compared to the old process. One director even said she really enjoys the dopamine hit she gets when she's ticking off those notifications!”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

Saving time to refocus on more strategic work

With Xoralia’s automated notifications and reporting now doing the heavy lifting around policy management administration, Khogali has been able gain hours and hours of time back.

Xoralia has massively reduced the hours spent having to reach out to people, chasing up on policies and checking where people are in the review cycle. It’s freed up a lot of time of my role to focus on more strategic and valuable matters.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer

Looking to the future

Currently the team are considering extending the use some of other features of Xoralia, including the employee attestation feature. Currently UKAD staff acknowledge they have read and understood policies using another system.

Adding employee attestation into Xoralia will help support new employee onboarding and also ensure staff are aware of new policies or where there have been critical changes.

Positive benefits for the long-term

Reflecting on his experience so far, Sam Khogali is very pleased with Xoralia’s initial impact.

We're really happy with Xoralia. From what we've seen so far, it's going to have a real positive benefit for the organisation.”

Sam Khogali, Quality Audits Officer