Business Intelligence for quality management teams: Charlie Rees interview

It's been a year since EQMS Business Intelligence, a powerful data management tool which enables quality professionals to pinpoint vulnerabilities, understand risks, and make the most of new opportunities, was officially launched. 

So we caught up with Qualsys chief data scientist, business analyst and EQMS Business Intelligence expert, Charlie Rees, to find out how the tool is being utilised by quality professionals across the globe. 

Why did Qualsys invest in a Business Intelligence tool? 

According to the Global Quality Survey in 2017, 2018 and 2019, quality professionals are spending somewhere between 30 to 60% of their working hours just compiling data for reports. Most quality professionals don't own the data they need. Often, quality practitioners are waiting days, weeks, and sometimes even months to get data from other departments.

But when we started researching business data management trends further, we discovered it wasn't just frustrating and slow for quality professionals - it was an enterprise governance, risk and compliance issue. What we found was businesses across the globe are struggling to implement a robust data management strategy. For example, Harvard Business Review reported that less than 50% of structured data is used in making decisions—and less than 1% of an organisation’s unstructured data is ever analysed or used at all.

More than 70% of employees have access to data they should not, and 80% of analysts’ time is spent simply discovering and preparing data. This is leaving organisations exposed to all kinds of compliance and governance risks. 

Capture and analyse data from across the business

So back in 2017, the Qualsys Product Innovation team reviewed how we could combine the power of EQMS with an advanced analytics platform to improve governance, risk and compliance data management processes, and to enable businesses to use this data to drive continuous improvement and profitability. 

Qualsys partnered with Logi Analytics, an expert embedded data management provider, and configured the software to work in harmony with EQMS and other external tools. 

What is EQMS Business Intelligence?  

There are essentially three core components in EQMS Business Intelligence:

1. A quality data lake: A centralised repository enables you to store all of your structured and unstructured data at any scale with no degradation to the performance of your management system. You can store your data as-is, without having to first structure the data, and run different types of analytics—from dashboards and visualisations to big data processing and real-time analytics to guide better decisions. The data lake allows you to import any amount of data in real-time. Data is collected from multiple sources, and moved into the data lake in its original format. This process allows you to scale data of any size, while saving time defining data structures, schema, and transformations.
2. DataSync: EQMS Business Intelligence pulls data from the other EQMS modules and external APIs and transforms it into workable data. It then deposits that data into your data lake. This reduces operational costs by 30 - 60% on manual data transfer - meaning you can spend your time focusing on critical thinking, strategy and business transformation. 
3. Data visualisation: A fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in your organisation. This is a fully managed service which lets you easily create and publish interactive dashboards on any device. 

Who is using EQMS Business Intelligence? 

Many of our large enterprise customers are now using the system to report on key metrics such as time, money and quality performance. 

One customer is conducting around 50,000 supplier audits a year using our Audit Manager module, and is using EQMS Business Intelligence to track cost savings found on audits. Detecting issues from failed audits represents savings of around £1000. Through the EQMS Business Intelligence dashboard, the team are about to demonstrate to leadership quality performance, ROQ and pinpoint risk areas. 

Another global FMCG manufacturer is tracking the amount of time to complete actions, checking SLAs, and has percentages of what's been completed versus incomplete. EQMS Business Intelligence is helping this customer to group data and display information in a logical way. 

I'm now currently in the process of helping an SME to map our 5S audit performance metrics into the dashboard. 

The main KPIs our customers are tracking in the system include: 

1. CAPA reports
2. Time to resolve
3. Percentage of on time in full deliveries
4. Return on quality investment
5. Time to complete versus target
6. Cost of Poor Quality
7. Waste

What is the process to set up EQMS Business Intelligence? 

I think one of the main misconceptions our customers have prior to implementing this tool is that it's going to be really difficult and time-consuming to get the dashboards setup.

Actually, all of our customers are delighted when they find out they can simply give us a wish-list of all the metrics and reports they want to see and say: "Over to you!" and we'll provide a completely managed service. 

It's essentially a five step process:

1. Send us your wish list

2. Qualsys scope and map your requirements, making recommendations 

3. Configuration 

4. Training 

5. Review and optimise 

For more information about Qualsys Business Intelligence software, request your custom demonstration.