Using our own software! – Part 1 : Quality Management
As a company that is ISO9001 certified, and also provides web based software specifically to assist in this area, it is great to get the chance to experience our own QMS software as a user – we have our own very genuine needs and its interesting to put our own software through our own hoops – instead of everyone else’s.
We actually only have 10 policies – one of those – our core “Specifications, Development, Testing and Delivery” process does have 4 flowchart based procedures, the others are perfectly well represented as application files and version controlled inside Quality Manager itself. We don’t even need the complexity of storing those in the main document management system – another cost saving for an SME client meeting the stringent demands of any QMS framework like ISO9001.
Policy Manager and Policy Publisher
In our case we use InfoCapture to control our audits, as we don’t have multiple sites or multiple legislation – or teams of auditors and quality managers – so the efficiency gains of using Audit Manager as a dedicated and powerful QMS application are just not there for us as a user. It’s a truly great application for larger companies – but we just don’t have the requirements so why use it just because it is free for us!
We do however store the primary flowcharts of our core “Specifications, Development, Testing and Delivery” process in our ‘Process Diagram’ album in image gallery. This gives the designers the ability to work on them as we refine the process, and also makes them available in smaller resolutions for presentations to interested clients and partners.
Flowcharts and online policies
Importantly whereas 9 of our policies are maintained as version controlled application files, the flowchart based process is totally online within Policy Publisher. This is a single policy with automatic inclusion of the latest version of each of the flowcharts – keeping the main policy up to date is therefore completely automatic – if a lead developer changes the process, the policy is automatically kept up to date.
Summary
We ourselves are very typical of any SME company that has some flowchart based procedures, a set of policies, and a requirement to schedule and manage internal audits, with in our case one additional external ISO9001 audit every year.
Of the 5 applications we could use from the Claromentis framework to meet this need:
- Document Management
- Policy Manager
- Audit Manager
- InfoCapture
- Policy Publisher
We as our client actually only need to use 3. Policy manager ( there is a new policy manager tour available here ) provides its own version controlled document management specifically for policies, and InfoCapture is great for scheduling audits, managing non conformancies and moving each audit through the appropriate stages towards a successful conclusion.
For our core development processes we maintain those online in Policy Publisher, removing the need for any application files and allowing us to maintain and present the relevant flow charts and showing how all these processes relate.Since each process chart is maintained as its own procedure, the policy will auto update whenever any chart is changed, as we continue to evolve our own processes.
As a final conclusion we made fast access buttons on our intranet home page to both Audits and Policies just to make sure we are all aware of everything, and nothing is more than a couple of clicks away.
Fast acces links to our Quality Management
All in all I can honestly say we are a very satisfied user of our own QMS software, and I believe we are a typical example of an SME company that has a real need to get proactive value out of compliance – in our case with ISO9001.
This software is helping us break down the barriers between the intent of the legislation – improving quality – and actually achieving that goal with minimum administration and maximum returns.