Customer Interview: Keeping Documents Moving to Reduce SOP Approval and Training Cycle Times

Customer success manager, Bob Kenney, recently caught up with Brandi, the Vault QualityDocs administrator and quality systems specialist at Forum Pharmaceuticals, on how the latest version of Vault QualityDocs has improved their organization. Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

Bob: What capability in Vault QualityDocs V10 has made the greatest impact to your company?

Brandi: Before V10, a SOP could sit around for 3 weeks or more waiting for everyone to review it, even though we knew the document had to be revised – as one person had already rejected it. Now with the short-circuit workflow, cycles times are much shorter and we don’t waste people’s time. Once someone rejects the document, the task is removed from everyone else’s queue, and the author/owner is notified of the rejection and can immediately make changes.

Bob: Were there any other capabilities that improved the timing of SOPs?

Brandi: Yes, the bulk read and understood (R&U) feature combined with binders organized by job role. For example when there was a new employee, it use to take about 40 minutes to get all the SOPs that they needed to be trained on out the door, as we had to find and click each SOP to send the R&U task. Now it takes about a minute – we click on bulk R&U for that job role binder, check desired SOPs, and Vault QualityDocs sends an R&U task for all selected content.

Bob: You said you use the delegation functionality, and I was surprised at how quickly you adopted it.

Brandi: This capability helps us keep things moving. People who are out-of-office delegate tasks to other team members, and our executives/senior managers can delegate tasks to their admin to get help managing their queue. The admin reminds them to review, and approve documents as due dates approach. The executive still ultimately owns the approval or rejection, and if the admin does approve any of the items on the executive’s behalf, it is logged in the audit trail and everyone can see who approved it.

If you have favorite features that you would like to share, please send an email to jing.to@veeva.com.