For years, organizations have increasingly been taking advantage of Enterprise Quality Management Software (EQMS) to automate processes and centralize quality data. While this streamlined approach delivers major efficiency gains, it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. In reality, the quality, risk, and compliance benefits delivered by EQMS are much greater.
Unfortunately, companies that just automate existing processes ("paper on glass") don't capture these added benefits. So not to sell your own implementation short, it’s important to understand the full scope of these benefits and align your goals accordingly. Although each one of these approaches may not be attainable immediately, they are certainly something to keep in mind and progress toward as you scale up your solution to the global level and extend it across the value chain.
From our research and discussions with industry-leading executives, we’ve developed a list of 7 ways an EQMS implementation can go beyond paper on glass. Whether you’ve got an EQMS implementation on the horizon or are just looking to progress forward in your quality management technology maturity, the goals listed below should provide some perspective on where you want to be.
1. Standardizing processes across the enterprise
For many quality leaders, standardization is one of the main goals of an EQMS implementation. In some cases, we’ve seen organizations with more than a dozen unique processes for auditing internal and external operations across different facilities. This approach may provide benefits at the local level, but the global inefficiencies require little explanation. Organizations are bypassing this challenge, consolidating and standardizing varied and overlapping processes by rolling out a single instance on the EQMS platform.
2. Being flexible enough to support changing business needs
One thing a homegrown solution has a lot of trouble providing is flexibility. It’s common for organizations to develop internal solutions for problems or sets of problems, but unfortunately this isn’t a scalable IT strategy. As business needs change and additional capabilities are required, homegrown solutions compile an increasingly burdensome total cost of ownership. EQMS helps to hurdle these issues, as the vendor is typically responsible for upgrades and maintaining the system.
3. Integrating the quality system from suppliers through customers
In the past, managing quality across the value chain was much more of a dream than a reality. However, as many of today’s EQMS solutions having the capability to easily integrate with existing enterprise systems found in different functional areas—PLM, ERP, CRM, SCM, MOM, LIMS, etc.—it’s more possible than ever to build end-to-end processes and achieve this value chain visibility.
4. Listening to the customer's voice
Many people today are talking about “closed-loop quality management,” the concept of streamlining quality process data and content from one process or value chain node back upstream to improve quality earlier in the value chain. For example, as more and more organizations are becoming customer-centric—many have to in today’s social world to remain competitive—closed-loop quality and the connection between customer feedback found within the CRM system and design or manufacturing system is rapidly rising in importance. EQMS's platform for managing quality is a key enabler of closed-loop processes.
5. Empowering people with actionable data
In our interview last week with Campbell’s Tom Braydich, he mentioned how people are starved for data. Streamlining process data and content with EQMS enables manufacturing, engineering, and quality management professionals with a considerably higher grade of quality intelligence that can much more easily be monitored and analyzed by job role, function, facility, product, process, and so on.
6. Driving continuous quality performance improvements
EQMS can provide excellent insights into leading indicators of key quality metrics. For instance, with EQMS you could analyze all unresolved CAPAs at the enterprise level, and then dive deeper into the facilities with the highest number to not only understand what’s causing such a lapse in identifying the root cause, but also to determine if additional resources are required there. This ability to analyze both high-level trends and local data is key to driving quality management performance improvements.
7. Having a single source of truth
Our research has shown that a majority of executives in manufacturing industries report a major challenge of having too many disparate quality systems and data sources. One characteristic of this fractured IT challenge is having data that says similar but different things, and quality leaders start to question (and even argue over) which numbers are accurate. With its standardized, platform approach, EQMS consolidates these different data sources acts as the single version of the truth.
Those are our thoughts on typical goals for an EQMS implementation. What do you think executives should be focusing on when deploying quality software? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
