Why Invest in Enterprise Quality Management Software?

The marketing team is waiting on the final feature list for this new product version. Sales is champing at the bit – they’ve got hungry customers clamoring for the latest build. Meanwhile, your quality assurance team is doing yet another pass. You want to get it right, but is it worth it to jeopardize missing the third pushed back deadline? How do you explain the setbacks, the outstanding tasks, the stretched-out timelines? Quality Management is a polestar of the organization, fostering progress and intercepting failure. You want to constantly improve, because it helps the whole company do better, but you feel as if you’ve reached a brick wall. So you’re researching Quality Management System software and a little in over your head. Where do you start? How do you choose?

We’ll start with identifying the pain points you’re looking to address. Then go over the main features of Quality Management Systems so that you know what to expect. And we will examine which elements of Quality Control software or Quality Management software can serve your needs.

Pain Points of Quality Control and Quality Assurance

Passing documentation back and forth

It’s necessary to be in constant contact and collaborating with everyone involved in quality control checking. But sending files over and over, drafting dozens of versions scattered across various threads can create confusion and disorganization. You need to push back deadlines or rewrite timelines when this happens.

No feedback from clients and partners

If you have trouble getting reports to your colleagues securely or don’t have a process for customer feedback, this blind spot will come back to bite you. The worst part is that you don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t act on a lack of information, potentially leading to recalls you could have seen coming and prevented.

Minimal communication about goals and results

Your product will suffer and so will your team’s motivation if you don’t set goals early on and track your results. Even when you take the first step, the second can be far harder to maintain. Not to mention the reporting you have to have in place to properly monitor projects. Once a version of a product is ready for market, how do you measure results without a collaborative tool to curate them?

What is the benefit of using Quality Management Software?

Document management software and quality management solutions go hand-in-hand. Both are toolkits for streamlining documentation processes as you store and retrieve said documentation. With a good quality management solution, you can fix holes in your workflows even while you’re fixing holes in your product.

No more wasted material. That also goes for time, attention, employees, and money. No more spending more than you need to just to make a basic quality assurance process occur in the first place. No more giant filing cabinets. No more extra meetings. No more employees dedicated to outdated branches of the process or vendors who leech off of your excess. As you clean house and cannibalize the surplus budget, you’ll get a clearer picture of your projects’ true shapes. You can capitalize on that increased transparency into how the sausage is made, including correcting course.

Once you’ve fixed your existing processes as a happy side effect of reviewing them while they’re digitized, you’ll see these processes shorten. The best quality management solutions will be easy to work with but also will demand organization and awareness as you set up workflows. This is because any fat on the bone will be in stark contrast to the inherent efficiency of the solution itself. The less steps you need on your way to results, the speedier production in your company becomes.

Not just speedy results but also quality products. Less cooks in the kitchen, less extraneous cogs in the machine, and less sub-processes to manage. Not only that, you can get a visual of your workflows and documents at any time to see what position a document or project is in, what is holding it up, whose tasks are unfinished, and at what times all of this occurred. Slow processes lead to burnout. Postponed tasks lead to forgetfulness and mistakes. Mistakes lead to restitution and recalls. There is a balance to be struck of course – move too fast, and the product will suffer anyway. Quality management is the premier aid in striking that balance.

The features of a quality management solution

Quality Assurance – Reviewing for bugs and problems

When you upload files into the system, from anywhere at any time, you enter your documentation into a controlled environment. Here, multiple related files can be grouped into a unique folder as a single document. You can add keywords to easily find this document while comparing notes down the line. Literally, as quality management solutions often offer notation options that persist as the product reports are amended and edited. Send these documents to others on your team in a shared workflow.

Quality Control – Fixing the problems

With version control, you can weed out the changes that led to bugs in your company’s software line or feature requests from your product’s customers. Turn back time by tracing back bad decisions to the root and starting over without wasting precious hours or even minutes. Once you’re confident in your new ideas, send them into an approval process flow for your team leads and department head to sign off on it with an eSignature. Or they could send it back for another quick review. All within the quality control system.

Product or Service Improvement – Beyond bug fixes

If you are collaborating with other organizations, you can obtain their feedback about the product by sending them the paperwork directly. Worried about corporate espionage where in-development products are concerned? A secure link will do the trick. The document never has to leave the system; instead, your colleague will get an email with a link to the relevant files. You can also work with an implementation team to build or integrate with your own client portal, allowing them a chance to submit their own experiences for use in the improvements. With retention policies, you will have no trouble remembering when a product’s version is up for review and who has to handle which next steps.

Improving the QA Process even further…

No Quality Management software would be pulling its weight if it couldn’t help you quality manage your quality management processes. Use audit trail capabilities to see where your documents are and where they need to be. That means a live view into your workflows as they unfold. Set up monitoring and run reports, which you can compare at any time. You’ll see how long workflows are taking and which aspects are taking longer. Need to speed everything up? Implement email notifications so that your employees receive frequent emails when they have unfinished business to take care of.

Choosing from a host of QMS Software Vendors

Whether you need Quality Management Software for Manufacturing or a Quality Control solution for a smaller team of 10 to 25 employees, every QM department needs something in place. Contentverse offers quality management that can be scaled to meet the needs of your product’s entire development cycle, from production and distribution to finance, administration, and even human resources. When you’ve streamlined your QM processes, why stop there?