ZenQMS Blog

John Mandy participated in thousands of audits during his 26-year tenure as a Quality Leader at Pfizer. Early on, Pfizer had thousands of GMP suppliers and CMOs located all over the world. In any given year, Mandy’s audit teams were executing  over a thousand internal and external audits and assessments. But even he was surprised when he was helping a site prepare for a significant re-inspection and had a local QA lead proudly show him a validation qualification for a new paper shredder.  That was just one of many times that he observed teams not taking a risk-based approach to systems validation. 

I often speak to quality leaders and other executives who boast that their paper-based quality management system is “perfectly sufficient” to meet the needs of their business. I just nod and smile because I anticipate that I will be hearing from them (in a panicked state) in the very near future when they realize the limitations of a manual QMS.  

Janet Woodcock made headlines (again) by discussing the possibility of a quality rating system to aid transparency in her recent blog. But the devil is in the details when it comes to ratings for a site’s quality maturity.

Maintaining quality is everyone’s job and a team effort. And when it is overlooked, bad things happen.

The mission of the Quality Leaders Forum (QLF) is to exchange knowledge and build a community of the best quality leaders in the life sciences industry. We will learn from one another and confront the challenges associated with compliance today – and in the future. 

 ZenQMS recently  hosted a live webinar featuring a presentation by Ed Morris, Managing Partner of The Morris Group and a well-known IT and Compliance expert.  If you missed it, there is a replay available on-line and I've written up a brief summary here:

When you think about it, a department, job function or role within a company can be easily be compared to working towards a degree with a specific major.  At most any University or College, there will be requirements that apply to all enrolled students as well as courses that are required for specific majors. And for each course requirement, there are quizzes, tests, and papers that need to be written to pass that course. 

I am frequently in meetings with quality leaders and regulatory experts where I find myself wishing I could share some part of the conversation or findings with a broader audience.  Something about the current state of affairs, best practice or just a really eloquent description of a pain point and how they are managing.  

“We’ve been able to reduce on-site audit time by more than 50% because we are able to provide auditors access to review documents in ZenQMS.”

After supporting more than a hundred eQMS implementations in my role as head of Operations here at ZenQMS, I have observed that the conversion from a paper-based to electronic quality management system (eQMS) can be either painful and cumbersome or quick and easy. The determining factors seem to be centered on the ‘health’ of the business’ quality processes- especially those related to document management and training.