Quality Management Software

Features and Benefits

Quality Management Software Easy to use For complex policy and procedure information sets

User-friendly tools allow you to create complex online policy manuals – including cross linking flow charts - without needing specialist technical support.

One of the key challenges is the sheer volume of information that needs to be maintained and referenced in multiple policies and manuals, and in different formats.

Two of the key features of Claromentis quality management software are important in solving this problem.

• All content is online in databases, and can be rendered in multiple formants such as PDFs - on demand.
• All procedures can be included in multiple manuals and policies.

Companies can create individual procedures, group them into policies, and build sets of policies into manuals for key business areas. If an underlying procedure is edited by subject matter experts, all policies and manuals will automatically update themselves to ensure accuracy with no further work needed from the Quality Manager.

Support for Collaborative Working within qulaity management software

Claromentis quality manager software allows approvals and collaboration between users and even external companies when creating, editing and distributing policies and procedures.

There is a comprehensive and auditable permission structure to absolutely ensure that the correct users can collaborate on policies and procedures, preserving the control and authority over the end result by the relevant quality managers. Quality Manager software operates inside the sophisticated and powerful permission system of Claromentis which uses groups, roles, individuals and extranet areas in any combination to control access. In this way the content is accurate as all required subject matter experts can contribute, but the policies and procedures are only approved by the relevant quality managers to ensure the system is completely accurate and up to date.

Employees are only able to view policies once they have been approved for publishing by an authorized owner.

This means that policies and procedures can be created, edited, approved and distributed to exactly the correct groups of people. Claromentis Quality Manager can even control the branding within which each user sees the policies and procedures, with no need for content duplication – the same content is maintained in a single location.

Using the Claromentis Extranet Permission System, if required, you can allow external companies to collaborate on relevant parts of your policies and manuals.

One version of the truth across all business units

Many businesses face the problem that different operating units have different branding, and so the same policy or procedure needs to be copied and rebranded. This is a key concern that needs to be addressed by truly online quality management software, moving away from the old concept of using version controlled but ultimately disconnected application files to support quality management systems.

Using application files inevitably increases the administration required whenever a policy changes – multiple copies need to be retrieved, and the latest versions rebranded and redistributed. This is an error prone and potentially dangerous process – as critical information is needlessly distributed in application files simply to present the information in the correct branding.

With Claromentis Quality Manager the problem is completely solved – each user will see the content of the policy according to the branding assigned to them. This is managed by the sophisticated and powerful permission system of Claromentis, which assigns branding according to hierarchical rules defined by membership of groups, roles or extranet areas. Store every procedure in a central 'bank'. This means you need to make a change once only, and the procedure will automatically be updated in every policy or manual in which it features, and be presented in the correct branding.

Although the online content is a central easy to maintain location for policies and procedures, where required specific procedures and policies can be exported to a wide range of formats including RTF, DOC, XML, PDF and HTML.

User View of Policies and Procedures

Having simplified the challenge of creating and maintaining Quality manuals, policies and procedures – Claromentis quality management software also provides an outstanding, visually appealing and fast interface for the user who needs to find the relevant information.

Quality Manager content is not only completely searchable, but also fully tagged according to any tags your company needs, these are completely customisable. Content can also be filtered by Reference and Title, the user can select to include policies or procedures, or both. Content that matches the tagging, filtering and searching are displayed in an attractive and simple view, with one click to access.

Quality Management Software Applications.

Quality Manager

The central application of the Quality Manager Product is the quality manager application itself.

This application reinvents the way policies and procedures are managed in the web 2.0 world, with all content moved completely online away from version controlled multi-branded, duplicated application files to auto updated online content; ensuring that the most complex library of compliance related information can be kept error free and compliant.

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Compliance

The compliance application is fully available within the Quality Manager Product to ensure that users are given every opportunity to read a compliance communication – for example a Quality Manager Online Policy or Procedure or a document – and administrators can monitor those who have and have not complied and send an appropriate series of customisable messages to ensure that they do comply.

In summary the Claromentis compliance application supports you in meeting compliance requirements for policy distribution. Using a series of targeted notifications and reminders, you can ensure personnel are aware of key policy developments. Tracking and reporting functions provide auditable confirmation that information has been viewed by relevant individuals.

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Publish and Documents

The Publish application is fully available within the Quality Manager Product to ensure that fully content managed pages and menus are available where this helps Quality Managers inform users of the information that is so necessary to ensure compliance.

The document management application is fully available within the Quality manager product and ensures that online policies and procedures can still integrate with version controlled application files where this is the most efficient way to store and present information for a business.

Comprehensive version control functionality ensures that only one user can update a document at a time, avoiding version duplication. A record of all revisions - including authorship and dates – provides full traceability.

Relevant information can be left in the version controlled document store as references to the online content of the policy or procedure, if this minimizes the workload in migration from legacy systems to Claromentis Quality Manager. These can appear as a version controlled reference lists in the policy, manual or procedure.

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Dedicated News Channels as part of Quality Management Software

Employees can keep themselves informed about policy developments by registering for ongoing news updates. This entirely optional feature can create a quality management portal to ensure communication of recent events with anyone who has an interest in those particular channels. RSS feeds can also be used within Claromentis to provide relevant information on important topics such as changes in government legislation or guidelines.

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People and Forums

The inclusion of the People Application within the Quality Manager Product ensures all of the user administration functionalities, active directory integration and membership of permission groups and roles are fully available to ensure that policies and procedures are created, managed, edited and consumed by the appropriate users effortlessly.

Forums enable you to receive employee feedback on specific policies through reader surveys, or enable colleagues to exchange views on key procedures and areas of policy development in dedicated forums. This is augmented by the document commenting feature within the document manager product.

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Process Management Software for Quality Managers

The challenges of modern Quality management software extend way beyond the management of static information, and into the realm of managing quality management procedures. For example - associated with Policies and Procedures there are not only many other relevant documents, but also potential requirements to report an incident relevant to the Policy. For this Claromentis provide an integrated fully configurable e-form solution.

Forms that need to be completed in accordance with the online policy or procedure can either be version controlled documents in Claromentis Document Manager, or can be E-forms generated by process management software.

If they are e-forms this allows reporting and analysis of every occurrence of a supporting form being completed. For example a Health and Safety manual may require that Accidents are reported in an associated e-form using process manager – the incidents can be reported on and analyzed to show trends, locations, severity and categories of accidents and incidents.

Project Highlights

Babcock Deploy Claromentis Policy Manager

Babcock Infrastructure Services had the opportunity to be the first to pilot the Claromentis Quality Manager application, developed to meet the particular policy management challenges that the Company was facing. The application works by allowing staff to build up a central ‘bank’ of policies and procedures. When manuals are assembled for different contracts, quality assurance staff can specify which policies are to be included for which audience, and the information is then drawn from this central source.

As and when policies need to be updated, staff make changes to the version in the policy bank and the information is then automatically updated wherever else it is held on the system. “Now we only need to make a change once rather than multiple times across numerous contracts,” says Matt. “That way we can avoid duplication of effort and be sure that the policy is updated consistently.”

Simplified policy management

The BIS team has approximately 2,000 policies and procedures in the Claromentis Quality Manager “This project just highlighted the fact that we had policies in multiple locations,” Matt remarks. “By having everything in one place, it will be much easier to control the updating process efficiently. Claromentis Quality Manager helps us to manage the procedure publication process and prove that we have appropriate policies in place.”

The application has been a hit with quality assurance staff at BIS. “We’ve had a lot of great user feedback,” says Matt. “They find it easy to work with and appreciate the support it provides in helping them to stay on top of policy updates.”

“Claromentis Quality Manager helps us to manage the procedure publication process and prove that we have appropriate policies in place.”

The full case study is here.