| | December 20208CIOReviewREFINING A QMS WITH TECHNOLOGYBy Dayna Nicholas, Director of Quality & Regulatory Affairs Manager, Land O' FrostQuality Management Systems (QMS) have been the mainstay for Quality department professionals since the Industrial Revolution. The American Society of Quality (ASQ) explains that a QMS was originally a set of standards to control the product or process but became more encompassing and is now defined as "a formalized system that documents processes, procedures, and responsibilities for achieving quality policies and objectives. A QMS helps coordinate and direct an organization's activities to meet customer and regulatory requirements and improve its effectiveness and efficiency on a continuous basis."For many years, a QMS was a collection of three-ring binders containing procedures, policies, product specifications, and other documents to describe the many programs designed to ensure product safety and quality throughout the production flow. Quality Managers are typically responsible for creating, revising, and training for each program that comprises the QMS. Internal and external audits then verify the effectiveness of the overall system. Typically, the programs are created and managed in some type of electronic system but printed for easy access by employees, managers, and auditors. While this works, it is unwieldy. Maintaining the same information in multiple sites or even binders allows for outdated or multiple versions of the same document and makes updating cumbersome.There are, of course, many choices in software to move the entire system from simple electronic procedures and spreadsheet databases to more interactive systems allowing real-time data entry on the production floor and access from any location. At Land O' Frost, the implementation of a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system provided the opportunity to modernize the entire Quality Management System at the same time. The ERP system contains a Document Management application that provides robust but customizable security along with a document approval process flow. Because documents are maintained in the ERP, product specifications, and Standard Operating Procedures can be assigned to products so that every time a shop order is generated, the most current document for that product is automatically attached, so the machine operator has easy access to that information.Dayna NicholasIN MY OPINION
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