30th March 2023
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Quality control is more than just eating a spare piece of brownie as soon as it comes out of the oven, to check it’s cooked.
Quality management software helps you to organise, assess, and audit your quality practices - all through one single platform. Instead of trying to coordinate various forms, spreadsheets, and documents in a siloed fashion, using a software system ensures everyone can contribute and access data for quality management at all times.
Selecting the right quality management solution is critical. For maximum return on investment, you should have a software that’s one centralised, cloud-based system, designed to help you achieve your organisation’s specific goals.
The wrong software can impede your progress. Imagine nightmare scenarios such as endless email updates to your employees or continued siloed functioning, that only cause more headaches - and will likely create their own flavour of substantial risk down the line.
Knowing what to look for when choosing new quality assurance and compliance management software - and what to avoid - is critical.
Here are some star features of an effective quality management system that will help elevate your quality assurance and transform both the efficiency and effectiveness of your organisation.
1. Configurable Workflows
Let’s face it, no one likes to be micromanaged and told what to do, at every point in their day. Indeed, micromanagement can be a culture killer at organisations, driving poor retention rates and high turnover.
Is micromanagement a people-only problem? Possibly not. If your software comes out-of-the-box, with preset processes that are established and unflinching, your people may start to baulk at the thought of being told what to do - or worse yet, waste their valuable time, struggling to fit square pegs into round holes. In essence, configurability is king.
Having a vendor that works alongside you to establish which specific aspects of the quality management software you need for your line of work, and which ones you could do without, in a way that champions your organisation’s culture is essential.
Whether micromanagement comes from people, or from your software, the outcomes will be the same. Stressed out employees, struggling to cope with little wiggle room, and trying to get their work done amid the rising tide of resentment and frustration towards a new system that does little to help them out.
Configurable workflows mean your organisation has a quality management system that seamlessly blends into your existing processes, improving overall efficiency, reducing errors, and saving time. The best of the best systems take configurability to the next level, going as far as using data inputs to anticipate logical workflow progressions. Technologically advanced features such as these help provide focus for your team, and remove irrelevant steps, ensuring your people get back to their primary responsibilities as quickly as possible. In this sense, software like ecoPortal makes effective and efficient quality management easy and accessible to front-line workers.
It’s an essential, yet often overlooked, feature of the software, but one that truly makes a difference in the long term.
2. Document Control
While paper documents may be a thing of the past, disorganised documentation within your organisational quality management processes are certainly not. Google Drives with an eclectic mix of titles and odd folders, where it still takes ample time to extract a critical document, are abundant. A lack of transparency, or automated role-based access leads to frustration and being asked - more than once - to share a document with the right people.
In essence, documentation control is another essential component that you’ll need to include in your hunt for effective quality management software. Software with documentation control helps you to digitise your documentation requirements, and from there, manage decision-making, ensure role-based access is in place, and most importantly, security requirements are ticked.
Not only does digitised quality documentation streamline your processes, but it also ensures you stay compliant with quality assurance standards, such as ISO 9001.
Take a quality incident report for example. When a potential supply chain issue arises, where the quality of a product has gone astray leaving unhappy customers and stressed workers in its wake, digitised documentation keeps the right people across the issue, and creates transparency around the entire incident.
3. Reporting and Analytics
Once upon a time, long, long ago, quality and risk managers would encounter a dreaded week within their working month, where they would recede from sight and disappear into a dark office for hours on end. The goal? Obtain the data, crunch the numbers, and write up a report - complete with high quality analytics - to present to the board, justifying that quality compliance standards were being met.
Fortunately, the present day looks different from this gloomy reality of yesteryear - at least, that is, for those who have managed to invest in an innovative, trailblazing quality management software. The constantly evolving, state-of-the-art quality management solutions of today come with automated report generation, complete with insightful analytics, as cornerstone features.
An effective quality management software can integrate data inputs from both quality-related incidents, as well as any audits and inspections you might do. These inputs can be integrated into one platform and give you a holistic view of everything.
The best software solutions can also present your data in various easily-digestible visual formats that you can then share with key stakeholders in your organisation, helping them to assess the current state of your quality management.
Solutions that excel in reporting will allow that data to be manipulated and presented in various visual formats that can be easily digested by different stakeholders in the business, helping them to assess the current state of your quality management.
True visibility for any quality management leader is the ability to take a quick glance at your quality management software platform, and get a snapshot of your company’s real-time metrics. Knowing what’s going on at all times helps yourself and other leaders engage in more informed decision-making that’s based on high-quality (excuse the pun) data.
- TRUE VISIBILITY FOR ANY QUALITY MANAGEMENT LEADER IS THE ABILITY TO TAKE A QUICK GLANCE AT YOUR QUALITY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PLATFORM, AND GET A SNAPSHOT OF YOUR COMPANY'S REAL-TIME METRICS.
4. Actions Management For Non-Conformance
Who manages the aftermath of a non-conformance quality issue?
The quality manager has a lot on their shoulders as is, and having to manually outline, assign and track corrective actions adds extra weight to their shoulders.
An integrated actions management system can alleviate the communications challenges that you may face following a quality management issue, helping assign the right people to the right actions to mitigate the issue and resolve it.
Once a report has been generated, and all the relevant people are aware of a specific issue, having an established actions management element to your quality management software, helps to track the right corrective actions that need to be taken following an issue, and - most importantly - ensure that further issues are stopped before they reach the customer.
By including an actions management feature, your software will help to tackle issues before they snowball into widespread disaster. Actions management ensures you have peace of mind, knowing you can navigate manufacturing defects, product non-conformance, or packaging failures with ease.
5. Product and Supplier Management
A final, essential feature of quality management software is a robust product and supplier management capability. With these tools in hand, you can easily keep a close eye on your suppliers’ performance, track the quality of the materials they supply, and ensure your final product continues to meet your organisation’s standards, before it meets the customer.
After all, you need to deliver consistent, high-quality products that meet your customers’ expectations. An effective product and supplier management feature can help you to identify the areas where your suppliers might be struggling, nipping issues in the bud. Or should issues arise, allow you to manage incidents effectively.
Good product and supplier management features should also include a continuous stakeholder feedback loop, enabling you to easily gather feedback from customers, suppliers, and your internal stakeholders to make informed decisions about product quality, and supplier performance.
Final Words
When you’re looking to elevate your quality management and ensure nothing less than excellent is your organisational standard, be sure to look out for these five indispensable features, when browsing software vendors.
To ensure you’re getting maximum return on your investment, finding a software vendor that offers more than just a piece of technology, but rather, a true partnership, is a must.
From a features alone standpoint, configurable workflows that anticipate your needs, stringent document control, detailed and informative data reporting and analytics, an established actions management system, and a product and supplier management component, will set you in good stead to transform your quality management systems.
With the right tools at their side, your Quality Managers will be able to free up their time, and focus on adding greater value to their role - and maintaining a standard of excellence.
