A question often asked is “Why would we want to use a dedicated digital solution for our quality and safety activities while Office and an intranet are working just fine?”. It indeed might work just fine, but that is also where the issue lies. Exactly in those two words: “just fine”.
Why digital?
A dedicated digital solution is defined as a solution which has the ability to manage all quality and safety related activities such as procedures, forms, issues, incidents, NCRs, CAPA and other registers. These solutions aggregate all information needed to make good business decisions and reduce business risks. They give deep insight in the cost of lack of quality and allow every employee to easily engage with the information.
The Office based solution might work just fine but requires many manual actions and is therefore not only labor-intensive but also prone to mistakes. A simple example is version control on procedures and processes. This administrative action can lead to employees using outdated versions. In addition, especially for companies where e-mail is used extensively, distribution is an issue and people tend to re-use wrong versions. The same goes for internal forms.
A digital solution helps companies prevent such mistakes from happening. Furthermore, the registration of for example NCRs and corrective actions can all be automated and linked. For example during an audit an NCR is identified and should be filed. This requires another form for the NCR plus the additional corrective actions should be registered. Good digital solutions have an easy to use interface where the entire registration process can be done on a single screen which saves over 75% of the time.
The next big advantage of a digital quality and safety management solution is the ability to have a good insight in what goes on in the management system. The structured data makes it easy to visualize what is valuable. Dashboards give great insight in the actions to be taken and status of certain KPIs. A good example is the ability to see which suppliers are doing great and which ones should improve.
The latest digital solutions have a mobile application. This allows for all kind of data collection which wasn’t possible in the past. Service engineers can easily report issues on the go while warehousing personnel can report issues when supplies are not delivered according to quality demands. These new streams of data weren’t reaching management in the past, because of the cumbersome process that required the reporter to be behind a desk or having the latest forms printed.
The decision to implement a dedicated digital solution to manage the quality and safety aspects of the company will add a lot of value by means of the opportunities described above.
Like to find out how a digital solution can streamline your business? Contact us nick@qooling.com
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