Choosing the best quality management software for your business 

The cost to business when quality management standards are not upheld is potentially fatal to its sustainability.

Introducing a quality management solution with an Environmental, Health and Safety EHS software that integrates with an existing system provides configurable functionality with the accessibility of Microsoft 365.

Quality Management Software (QMS) provides all the tools for automation, addressing issues, and driving quality improvement across the enterprise.

The purpose of QMS software

The purpose of Quality Management System (QMS) software is to help ensure businesses consistently achieve customer requirements.

This entails coordinating a range of information including nonconformance reports, audits and inspections, corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs), documentation such as company policies and training.

EHS software assists with QMS by allowing the business to streamline processes and ensures compliance which leads to enhancing the business’ overall performance.

This is achieved by ensuring that the business adheres to compliance and other regulatory standards, streamlines incident reporting and management as well as providing opportunity to identify root causes.

Risks are managed by not just constantly evaluating processes using risk assessments but also by identifying potential hazards and risks.

The business is also able to continually improve by using a standardized system where KPI’s and other performance metrics are measured in real-time, allowing the business to consistently be able to monitor and improve where required.

Factors to consider when choosing a Quality Management System

There are several factors that need to be considered when choosing a software solution. Firstly, the standards that the business needs to be complied with. While ISO 9001 is the most popular EHS standard in the industry, software should also be able to be configured to accommodate AS 9100, Six Sigma and SMMI.

The size of the company should also be considered. Mid to large organizations with over 1000 employees tend to benefit the most from integrated solutions, especially if Microsoft 365 is already embedded in the business.

The benefits of true integration

Some custom QMS solutions that have used tools within the Microsoft suite using Forms, SharePoint and Power Automate may provide a short term solution, but are not a sustainable solution.

These solutions are often time-consuming for Quality to create and support, require coding knowledge for non-basic workflows and data modelling and the projects are likely to run over time and over budget.

Cobbled-together systems can sometimes even worsen the very quality issues you’re trying to solve, such as unreliable communication.

This approach may provide an adequate stopgap for small companies—or, at the other end of the scale, a highly custom system for giants with abundant IT resources—but is not the best solution for most enterprises.

Instead, organizations in this bracket (typically 1,000-50,000 employees) require a solution that combines the benefits of QMS software with that of Microsoft 365.