It seems many mid-sized companies still rely on paper-based quality management systems to maintain compliance of their documents. While these paper-based systems are fine for managing products and quality, they usually fail in helping a company stay compliant. Improvements on documents also become more difficult to control using paper-based systems because of increasing document volume.
Your own company may still use papers and spreadsheets to manage all your documents, training records, plus corrective and preventive actions. When you strictly rely on your team working with these systems, you're playing extreme risk with mistakes. You're also wasting resources using paper and spreadsheets because of how much time gets involved managing documents.
Because you run a regulatory environment in your company, you really need to upgrade to something more efficient. Before you do, though, you need to understand what the true cost is of paper-based quality management systems.
You may not have complete awareness of how much money you're losing until looking into your company metrics. Once you find out, an electronic quality management system can end up being the rescue you need.
Controlling Your Documents
No doubt you've noticed how little control you have of your documents lately while in the process of making company changes. That's dangerous when all of your documents need control for regulations to avoid violation fines.
All of this stems from the review process for paper documents, which can take considerable time when having to check them individually. In a paper-based management system, a manager has to go through a more protracted review process to ensure all documents stay compliant.
Things become more complicated when employees have to edit documents manually. This only leads to more errors in the long run because of the excessive amount of documents needing managing.
For CAPA management, this also proves troublesome because there isn't any way to collectively see what document improvements took place.
Lack of Prevention Methods
Your quality manager may already have added stress trying to make sure every document adheres to compliance rules. Paper-based management systems just don't provide any way for those managers to track documentation problems and find ways to prevent it from happening again.
Preventative measures are an important role for quality managers to make sure major disasters don't happen. Without being able to properly track every document, you face serious risks like having to recall a drug, or even a death due to misinformation on your part.
It's time you gave your quality manager an easier time with an electronic quality management system that keeps collective track of all documents.
Lack of Metrics Available
There isn't any question that metrics are the most valuable source for all companies today. Without them, you're basically flying blind with what's really going on in your company. A paper-based management system can't provide timely metrics to determine what documents had corrections and which ones haven't.
While you may have metrics available in your company, far too many similar systems don't report until a week or month later. You need something with real-time analytics so you know what's happening hour-to-hour every day. Without catching a document that needs attention, it could go unnoticed for weeks before an error gets caught.
An Electronic Quality Management System as a Money Saver
Using a quality eQMS software can help your entire team get on the same page about document control and prevent any wasted time used to assure compliance. Wasted time is a major liability in all companies today as competition becomes fiercer.
Better management of your documents helps everyone use their time more wisely and prevents major disaster, which can already rescue you from the worst financial fallout.
For a fascinating look at the costs of Paper or to find out about our own eQMS software that can help you with document management, training management, CAPA's, and audits.click below
Zen QMS offers a validated Quality Management System that can help you graduate from your paper QMS to an affordable, easily implemented cloud based QMS
