Maintaining product quality is an amiable goal to have. It is, however, easier said than done. It’s likely that if you do have to maintain documentable quality standards, you are working in a government regulated industry rife with rules, procedures, and regular audits. Because of this, you’ll find that in order to main quality standards, your desk will have a mountain of forms that needs to be checked and authorized, data sheets, policies, SOPs, etc. etc. that will need to be dealt with.
Good news: not only can the cloud ensure that product quality standards are met, it can help save countless man hours that were usually spent pouring over stacks of paper. All quality procedures can be consolidated and expedited into cloud-based quality management software (QMS). There is non-cloud-based QMS out there, but – as usual – the cloud is the better option.
Inevitably, businesses grow. If they do not, they go under. As businesses grow, paperwork increases, more employees need to be trained, and there are more products that need to meet quality standards. Through QMS, all of those issues are taken care of. Of course, as has been discussed countless times about business cloud software, a business’s scalability is nearly infinite since there are no limits to the cloud.
As for keeping up with the paperwork, QMS has document control, which keeps that paperwork from becoming a beast that you can’t tame. It basically creates a repository in the cloud for all documents to be viewed, updated, and authorized seamlessly. One of the problems with manually doing this is that you never know if the document you are currently looking at is up-to-date. With QMS, all documents are up-to-date.
Doing everything manually on paper is horribly inefficient. During an audit you don’t want to be handing out documents that have even the slightest chance of being out-of-date. Production could potentially be halted because of this issue.
Even if you rely on completely electronic documents and spreadsheets your documents have a chance of being out-of-date without the cloud. Signatures and approvals are essential for any regulated industry as well; with the cloud, documents can be authorized online instantly without any email chains, phone calls, or hassle.
If your employees aren’t trained properly, your product’s quality will rapidly become subpar, guaranteed. Cloud QMS provides the tools and resources to ensure new employee training is consistent and complete. Tasks associated with training become automated, like automatic grading for online exams. In the document repository, you can store and view all your documents related to training and you can keep records in the cloud of every employee that has completed training.
When your business grows, your customer base also grows. There’s an unfortunate truth that goes along with this: as your customer base grows, so does your number of customer complaints. Every business is going to receive complaints no matter what; the important thing is handling the complaints appropriately. Cloud QMS allows you to track complaints to make sure that they are dealt with properly from the moment the complaint is filed to the moment it is resolved.
To mismanage customer complaints is to mismanage a huge source of revenue. It’s a fact: if you lose customers, you will lose revenue. Cloud-based QMS software ensures that every customer complaint is handled, so that customer retention is increased.
Don’t keep your business grounded: put in the clouds.
By Declan Peltier
