Published July 2019, GPOptimizer Summer Edition
By Frances Donnelly, C.Q.P.A.

If you are experiencing these frustrations, then digitally transforming your quality management processes should be in your future.

• Tired trying to generate your quality control data for Certificates of Analysis and Conformance with off line systems and constantly worrying if the archived documents are recoverable?
• Fed up searching through network folders for the right excel spreadsheet to use to generate a certificate?
• Frustrated with the user restrictions around data entry in Excel holding up your processes?
• Spending too much time double checking the content on a certificate so that there is no reason for your customer to reject shipments?
• Worried that lack of audit trails with your current systems will affect your regulatory status?

These are just a few of the challenges we have helped our customer’s overcome with Quality Essentials Suite.

Supporting Certificates of Analysis and Certificates of Conformance is a real headache for many manufacturers. These certificates have to be available to support shipments but they are not generated out of the mainstream ERP data. Creating, distributing and archiving these documents, because of their regulatory nature, constitutes a critical subsystem and often companies are forced to rely on Word, Excel or some proprietary tool that no one knows how to update. It can be a real nightmare of risk.

Over the last twenty years advances in technology mean that we can supply end to end quality management solutions that truly meet the needs of the quality department and also the needs of departments like shipping and sales. More importantly Horizons can deliver our solution affordably because we don’t price our products based on either named or concurrent users.

Legacy solution, whether proprietary development or off the shelf, that can handle the complexity and variation of inputs and outputs needed for quality management to generate these certificates have been expensive. These solutions, whether on premise or web based, are sold on a per user license basis. This means that when trying to deploy the solution for best fit with business process flows the cost escalates rapidly in order to obtain sufficient licenses for efficient operations. If the choice is made to limit investment then the offset is less efficiency and new bottlenecks are often discovered.

These other products often bring unnecessary overhead to the process too. They want users to buy a range of individual modules and before they know it buyers are looking at very large price tags for what is a simple application. With Quality Essentials Suite, we keep it simple with just two modules, Data Management and Improvement Management.

Companies looking to get out from under this combination of risk and expense burden while still meeting response and budget goals can do so with the Quality Essential Suite from Horizons International.

What makes our solution different?

We are often asked what makes our solution different from the legacy products in the marketplace. Here are a few key differentiators:

Affordability with Unlimited User Access

Our solution is sold per module based on number of companies in the installation configuration and specifically allows for unlimited user access to the functionality, governed by user security rules of course. The goal is to ensure that end users can build their business process flow in a manner that is most efficient for them and that is not constrained by user license cost. We know it is important to have everyone be involved in the goal of quality. With unlimited user access we make sure that is possible.

Runs on Multiple Devices

Managing and benefiting from your quality control data should, today, be easier and more affordable than it has been in the last 20 years. The cost of hardware and software has continued to decrease and the improvements in speed and responsiveness, whether over the web or on a local network, has also been occurring. Development tools allow the creation of user interfaces that can run on a range of devices which means the quality department can put data collection tasks where they are most efficient. It also means that dashboards for control charting and analysis can be rolled out easily to every relevant member of staff without concern for cost.

Supports Data Collection, Analysis, Reporting and Audit Trails

The functionality in the Data Management module is targeted to the core tasks for quality management of data collection, data analysis, reporting and audit trails. When all those functions are in one shared solution risk of errors is reduced and tasking around certificates of analysis and conformance is highly efficient.

© Horizons International, LLC
Published GPOptimizer January 2019