Best-in-Class Quality Management Features
To ensure quality and compliance in your organization, you require a perfect blend of people, processes, and software. A best-in-class Quality Management System serves as the foundation for building a QMS environment that meets or exceeds expectations and requirements. Significant components of enterprise QMS applications include the following nine elements. In this guide, we discuss best-in-class quality management features.
Inspection Plans
The QMS application provides a flexible framework to develop inspection plans and checklists for all inventory or manufacturing transactions, such as inventory receipt of goods from vendors, warehouse transfers, material issues to production, and physical inventory activities.
Test Plans
QMS applications enable users to create test plans with flexible evaluation criteria using Boolean, alphanumeric, numeric, validated lists, and other evaluation methods against a predefined, expected result to ensure products fit and function.
Acceptance Quality Limits (AQL)/Sampling
The QMS application provides users with a flexible system to define sampling levels such as Acceptance Quality Limits (AQL). Further, evaluation results are based on severity level (major, medium, minor) and the result criteria (rigorous, moderate, flexible) with the end goal of supporting ISO 2859 / ANSI/ASQ Z1.4 and similar standards.
Security & Control
The system must have multiple levels of authority that control who can create, perform, and approved functions, edit records, and access quality data.
Tooling & Equipment
Users define tools used in the quality control process with details related to tool conditions such as calibration dates and certificates of calibration, and equipment status.
Health & Safety
The QMS application provides tools to manage employee health and safety incidents with steps to mitigate, correct, and prevent future issues.
Training & Education
The QMS system provides a framework to manage training and certification requirements for employees with controls to restrict access to specific tasks based on training levels.
Audit Logs
The QMS system enables users to define and control multiple audits for both data and processes to ensure compliance with quality standards. Audits must be flexible to accommodate systematic and manual processes.
Non- conformance (NC) and Corrective & Preventative Actions (CAPA)
QMS features support internal, customer, and vendor non-conformance (NC) and Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPA) procedures to document steps for quality test failures and product disposition.
The quality and compliance strategies you implement depends on the number and complexity of compliance regulations you manage and the capabilities of your ERP system. Entry-level accounting systems like QuickBooks and low-end ERP systems provide limited quality and compliance features. In addition, old legacy ERP software is expensive to customize and difficult to connect with quality applications. Conversely, modern cloud ERP applications are designed for connectivity, reducing risk by providing a flexible platform to adapt to ever-changing quality and compliance regulations.
Your ability to remain in compliance depends on your business systems, the number of regulations you manage, and the complexity of those regulations. Drop us a line on 011 792 9521 or contact us via email to learn more about Acumatica’s best-in-class quality management features.