EQMS – What is it?
You might have guessed that EQMS refers to “electronic quality management system”, where all your quality processes are managed electronically. Unfortunately, you are barely scratching the surface of what an Enterprise Quality Management Software is.
Yes, Enterprise Quality Management Software is what EQMS stands for.
Many businesses have evolved from fully paper-based QMS to having managed their quality processes electronically to some extent for years now. This might have meant recording manual checks performed in an excel sheet, or scanning a document to have a backup as part of control of documents. While teams have worked on maintaining quality, the improvements made from having an electronic QMS were still limited, as they mostly only tackled quality issues on a more basic level of helping with administrative paperwork. Some teams might have enhanced their electronic filing systems, but still faced trouble with document version control. They might have this issue of version control addressed through electronic publishing systems, some even with electronic signature functions. But often, these improvement works were only short-term, localised solutions. That resulted in an ineffective and unvalidated system, inefficient for the business in the long-term.
Such differences in an organisation would be a particular problem. Even as each department is working to maintain quality, inefficiencies would occur and come at the expense of quality.
This is where EQMS comes in, to bridge the gap.
An EQMS serves as a bridge between various departments across the whole enterprise, such that the whole organisation can work efficiently together, with quality at the centre. Rather than merely being an electronic filing cabinet with your company’s controlled documentation, it serves as a common platform for your whole company to better communicate and collaborate.
There are many cases where such a platform is needed. Let’s take an important example, reporting a customer complaint with faulty products (Non-conformances/Corrective and Preventive Action). In such an instance of a non-conformance, the Sales department and Operations department would have to be in close collaboration to properly handle the situation when the non-conformity is first discovered. The Product Development department might be involved as part of the corrective action, and coordination with the Manufacturing department may also need to occur. External and internal quality processes are involved in this case. With many organisations, there are gaps between these processes. Communication and collaboration between all departments on the same EQMS platform clearly would close the gap and enhance the proper and timely response to the non-conformity.
EQMS is not a fantasy!
Stendard Solution™ has been designed as an EQMS platform to bridge gaps and put quality at the centre of your business. With workflows that you can create and customise, you can easily tailor a fool-proof to-do list for your team and all involved in any project of yours. Your organisation’s SOPs will be brought to life and cross-functional collaborations can be smoothly managed. If you have team members or partners/collaborators based in different countries or are constantly travelling, you will definitely appreciate such capabilities even more! As a cloud-based platform, your team can easily perform tasks, acknowledge or review documents, and even sign-off electronically. Quality would not be put on hold due to physical constraints.
Quality management plays an important role in every part of the value chain, from product design and development, all the way through distribution and customer feedback. You would want to keep your long-term business growth in mind as well. An EQMS would enable you to achieve that by having all parts of the value chain growing in the same vein, rather than localised sprouts that would be inefficient to manage over time.
