Metrics that Matter

While the adoption of an EQMS can certainly drive efficiency of quality & compliance processes, we have also seen direct quantitative impact on key business metrics after deploying an EQMS like ComplianceQuest.

The market for Quality Management Software (QMS) is poised to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 9.7% to USD 15.48 billion in the period 2017-2026, a report by Polaris Market Research indicates. This growth is expected to be triggered by the stringent regulatory environment and replace paper-based systems with automated QMS to improve product quality, efficiency and customer satisfaction.

The Life Sciences industry is especially feeling the need to transform from compliance to quality to counter the high number of product recalls, product bans, drug shortages, plant shutdowns, and enforcement actions continue to rise. QMS helps in automating a range of functions, from complaint handling, audit management, change management, nonconformance / corrective & preventive, to document control, to name a few. This is expected to reduce the risk of failure of quality processes and lower costs by identifying track deviations and non-conformances for mid-course correction and improving safety and other features.

Though the adoption of QMS can improve efficiency and productivity of an enterprise, we believe it is important to measure the success of the implementation and understand its effectiveness. Organizations must set measurement parameters that can help in continuous improvement and achieve high quality performance in operations and GMP compliance.

The Role of Data

One of the key ingredients for developing good metrics is the availability of data from across functions, both quantitative and qualitative. The data must be SMART (Specific – Measurable – Accepted – Realistic – Time Bound), and be specific to each function while also providing an overall perspective. For organizations with offices in multiple locations, the quality metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) should be consistent across geographies and enable sharing of visual information and data.

This is not without its pitfalls. Excessive data and too many metrics can in fact divert the focus from core issues and lead to misinterpretations and skewed strategies.

Therefore, the QMS system should have dashboards customized to the needs of the individual businesses, providing meaningful insights that can help them steer their course to success.

A next-generation EQMS software like the one from ComplianceQuest does just that.

According to research, EQMS, on average resulted in the following positive effects on their enterprise:

These have improved the corporate financial health of the organizations manifold, while also delivering on its core promise of automating the compliance workflow. The EQMS from ComplianceQuest is built on the Salesforce.com platform and can directly impact not only quality/compliance metrics but key financial and growth parameter of organizations.

These are certainly metrics that truly matter.