When working to keep your quality control department compliant, do you rely heavily on paper intensive processes? By fully relying on physical documents for standard procedures involving communication with state, federal, and third party agencies you’re slowing your business down and potentially putting it at risk.
Why automate?
In traditional processes, documents and paperwork get shifted around from person to person, department to department, with no real way to keep track of them. Key quality control documents including ECN (engineering change notice), SOPs and Inspection Reports can easily be misplaced or deleted, leaving your organization vulnerable.
Leveraging web forms and other document related technologies, companies can reduce manual routing, revision control, automatic assignment of tasks to fulfill a change order process and ensure all steps for compliance were followed. Moreover, to ensure CFR Part 11 compliance documents are securely stored in a document management system to prove intent, and structure process.
Depending on your industry, you may be required to maintain records of all quality documents for years, even decades. If you are producing or distributing at a high rate, the paperwork builds up quickly. Rather than have stacks of papers within filing cabinets (that are susceptible to fire or flood), upgrading to a digital repository can help save you space as well as time spent searching for records.
By automating your process and managing your documents digitally, you’ll always know where they are and who they’re with, ensuring that you uphold company, industry, and federal standards.
What are some other benefits of Quality Control Automation?
- Capture, store, distribute, and track production and control record, and link certifications and licenses.
- Automate tasks for sales order processing
- Pre-define documentation requirements, approval steps and due dates, making each document that goes into your system easier to manage.
- Create collaborative workflows that include alerts, approvals, reporting, and annotation, and distribute documents for approvals in just a few steps.
- Utilize intelligent data capture, full text OCR (optical character recognition) and document indexing to make your records easily searchable.
- Integrate with your existing EQMS, BOM, and ERP Systems
How does automation work?
In simple terms, it’s streamlining the process of the process of collecting, capturing and storing engineering, production and quality control documents while maintaining regulatory compliance.
With automation, all of your files can be quickly captured, processed and securely stored in a central document repository allowing authorized employees to instantly search and retrieve them. Related documents can be linked providing instant access from other related documents. Tasks are routed through workflow according to your defined business rules, user roles and access rights. All of the steps in your processes can be automated to reduce dependence on time intensive manual entry and approval processes. A secure web-based interface provides access to documents from anywhere in the world, at any time.