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4 Must-Have Components for Effective QMS Software

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Quality management is an integral part of the business process that ensures excellence in the company’s products and services. It helps identify weaknesses and faults, and ensures that these problems are taken care of promptly.

Quality management can set a successful company apart from a failing one. Companies that don’t invest in quality management risk losing their reputation and customers.

How to Evaluate the Performance of a Quality Management System?

Evaluating the performance isn’t as difficult as it may seem. Start by defining the company’s measurements of quality, and determine if the QMS provides those measurements.

Consider these questions as well: Does it provide those measurements quickly enough for the team to make decisions that will address issues and improve operations? And does it provide that information in a way that’s easily accessible by everyone who needs it, in a unified manner and in a format that’s easy to understand?

Addressing those questions should be the starting point of your evaluation. If the answer to any of those questions is no, it may be time to consider a change.

The Top 4 Essential Elements of a Quality Management System

A quality management system (QMS) documents procedures, standards, and responsibilities to manage quality processes within an organization. Among its many benefits, the most important ones include increased agility, continuous improvement, and compliance.

Outdated QMS — whether legacy software or paper based — is complicated, fragmented, and unable to fully meet today’s complex business and compliance requirements.

Modern QMS software is cloud-based, easy-to-use, and should reflect the following four attributes.

1. Unified

No one wants to toggle between siloed, disconnected legacy systems. In older QMS software, it’s common to not have a document control integration. This means having to switch between disconnected systems multiple times a day, wasting precious time.

Moving to a multi-tenant cloud QMS seamlessly brings together quality processes, document management, data, training, dashboards, and reports in a single unified QMS suite.

Managers, employees, contract manufacturers, suppliers, and auditors all access a single application, which increases visibility, provides users with better control and improves communication and collaboration.

Moreover, supplier quality management integration increases supplier accountability and speed. This improves quality processes and ensures compliance to quality standards while reducing risk.

2. Collaboration

A unified cloud-based QMS application enables real-time collaboration to ensure compliance and agility from internal stakeholders and across your supply chain.

Modern solutions like Veeva QualityOne enable your suppliers and contract manufacturers to have full (and secure) access to business critical quality control documents and the ability to directly participate in quality processes. By collaborating in a single unified system, you can achieve 100% visibility, accountability and tracking across supplier certifications, supplier audits, SCARs, and supplier performance. 

Additionally, working in the same system ensures suppliers only access the most current versions of documents - keeping your supply chain compliant and reducing the risk of partners using older versions of specs.

3. Transparency

Modern QMS software delivers increased operational transparency through robust dashboards and reporting capabilities. You can easily view real-time status of activities and conduct ongoing analysis to identify areas for improvement. This capability shifts an organization from reactive to proactive, allowing them to identify, prevent and fix inefficient processes as they’re happening, rather than months after the fact.

Imagine you’re a manufacturer with supplies in foreign countries. Rather than waiting days, or even weeks, to get inspection data on products, modern QMS software makes it possible to gather data in real time, eliminating delay in quality analysis. This not only reduces risk within companies, but also saves them time and money.

4. Control

Modern QMS software allows companies to easily control access, visibility, and permissions to make sure that only the right people take the right actions at the right time, without compromising data integrity or history.

Audit trails capture every event in a process, including task creation and assignment, and more. This helps to measure performance, guaranteeing that all processes meet compliance standards, and are being done effectively.

Ultimately, your QMS must facilitate efficiency and productivity, while lowering your costs and engaging employees and customers.

Contact us to learn about Veeva QualityOne
Our complete, easy-to-use quality management application

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