Driving a High Performance Quality Organization with Real-time Operational Visibility

By James Huang, Director Global Quality System, Atrium Innovations

When I started in quality, everything quality-related was on paper or leveraged systems built around paper-based processes. With significant innovation in technology, companies are moving to the cloud – adopting digital quality management and compliance systems.

At Atrium Innovations, we wanted a central place for all our sites around the world to easily manage quality processes, records, and content. Allowing sites to securely access each other’s procedures and quality information, we can share challenges – and as a team – expedite resolutions. It allows our teams to collaborate and harmonize processes, promoting best practices and gaining efficiencies.

Once the data is entered, it is immediately accessible and can support many areas including timely identification and resolution of issues. With real-time capture of important quality information, we have greater transparency into each site and can aggregate the data for global visibility. When digitizing quality management, data about processes is automatically collected and we can use it to better understand, for example, where delays occur and if they are resolved. Quality teams can make better decisions with more complete data. We saw timelier product releases and faster product decisions after we implemented Vault Quality Suite – a unified suite of cloud-based applications that includes Vault QMS, a quality management solution, and Vault QualityDocs, a content management solution. To learn more on how I brought together 13 global sites – driving transformation in key quality areas, watch this presentation.

Companies can stay very lean with cloud, as they don’t have to worry about storing, archiving, or ensuring availability of the quality information. We are reinvesting the time we have gained to continually improve our quality operations such as developing key quality metrics. Using the data we have gathered, we can track trends and gain better insight into the health of quality operations. It will also support proactive quality indicators – preventing small issues from becoming big problems that can ultimately result in product containment or a recall.

The speed at which cloud applications evolve also helps us to drive continuous improvement in our quality operations. New capabilities are rolled out every 4 months and we leverage them to further optimize the quality function and make our company more competitive. If you want to lear more, visit our resource centre.