How Mobility Culture will Improve Enterprise Quality Management Software

No one wants to use his professional device while spending some time with his family but just wonder how much you would be on your phone if it starts showing customer complaints by product line, open CAPA by the supplier and OEE facilities in real time. The Even more troubling situation would be when visualization tools start allowing you to filter data by region, plant, products etc. If you know about Enterprise Quality Management Software or EQMS, then you must be realizing that these technologies are not far from us. The fact is that few vendors have already started selling even today. There is no doubt that mobility concept has evolved and matured in other software categories, but still there is scope of improvements especially in the quality. As EQMS vendors continue to invest in possibilities and capabilities, chances are that the next generation mobile apps will be common and maintain the standard as expected by the users. Now, with mobile enabled quality management rising steeply and reaching at our doorsteps, it is important for us to know what future holds for us. At present, we expect three different functionalities to influence our lives in near future.

The first is preventive and corrective actions, incident management and audit management that utilize native smart phone functionalities. With the advent of EQMS, many companies have already started automating CAPA, incident management, audit management, streamlining the root cause analysis and integrating with other functionalities. EQMS enabled smart phones allow business managers to leverage basic functionalities of smart phones in creating new corrective actions, upload pictures, videos/audios and route issues along with attachments to authorized persons. It is estimated that mobile-enabled corrective actions will carry more value and expedite resolutions. Number of vendors has already started investing in it now and busy building its capacity.

The second in this pursuit is streamlined audit management with online/offline capabilities. The arrival of EQMS has helped in standardizing and centralizing the audit management process in the entire enterprise sector. These applications make everyone to work on the same level thus, both scheduled and spot auditing can deliver higher quality and spontaneous data. This data helps business managers in understanding global trends and customize the working environment accordingly. The concept of using mobiles for EQM is pushing it in the meaningful direction and it is estimated that mobile-enabled auditing system will adopt a swift pace in the future and leave EQMS system behind. Using smart phones would help auditors remove the chances of errors that arise during duplicating the data. The only thing that auditors would need to do is to carry smart phones and tablets for information collection. The "working in offline" mode would help auditors in working even in remote areas, where proper mobile network is not available.

Third in this line is real-time reporting and analytics integrated with business intelligence tools. It is predicted that quality dashboards would be one of the first mobile functionalities as the areas of CAPA and audit management will feel its urgent requirement. Vendors will have to make sure that they don’t infuse the same visualizations as of desktops in the mobile apps. They will have to develop visualizations and analytics in an intuitive way for the smaller screen size and touch technology.

CONCLUSION

The use of smart phones and mobile apps in the quality management sector has brought excitement for everyone connected with this sector. The users will be able to view quality metrics and process data even from remote locations and it is expected that this mobility culture will fill the existing information gap. By using smart phones and tablets, auditors will not only witness improvements in EQMS functionalities but also in functions like risk management, supplier quality management, employee training and many more.