As businesses expand to multiple sites, one of the key planning decisions is how they will deliver consistent levels of quality and performance.
Will quality be centralised? If so, how will we monitor performance, suppliers, training? How many people should control the system? Who should control the system? If we choose not to implement a centralised quality management system, will we segment it by language, site, country, or portfolio product? Or do we need a mixture of both options?
The good news is that Qualsys's software is designed to have a flexible architecture, so you have a choice of how to implement the system.
Below are examples of how global businesses structure their business / quality management system.
1) Diageo – a consistent, integrated central management system
Whether you’re drinking a glass of Johnnie Walker whiskey or a pint of Guinness, Diageo want to ensure the quality is the same everywhere in the world.
Diageo use Qualsys’s EQMS software to ensure the policies, standard operating procedures, and processes used to manufacture, store and distribute their products are always consistent, regularly reviewed and fully approved. Diageo also uses Qualsys's software for internal audits.
Administrators manage various processes centrally, for example, one administrator controls all distillation and maturation processes, another controls malt distilling, and another controls beer operations.
(Example for illustrative purposes)
Our system is global. Diageo staff in other areas like Australia and Singapore heard about the system and jumped on the bandwagon. The module is now used in North America, Australia, Southeast Asia, Ireland and Scotland, which is my area.
Janice McMillan - Business management systems coordinator at Diageo
2) BT Global Services – a secure management system for each customer
BT Global Services use EQMS as a strategic solution for business management. Within BT, EQMS is used to share critical information with large corporate customers. Contractual documentation, audits, risks and issues are shared in a controlled EQMS environment to ensure contractual transparency. This also ensures both parties always have access to the latest information.
BT has a multi-sited configuration consisting of over 170 discrete EQMS instances. Customers have confidence that important information that can comprise contracts, billing, manuals, policies and service level agreements etc. are all fully secure and only accessible by authorised individuals.
From a BT perspective, all sides are easily maintained through a central administration system that allows cross-platform upgrades of the software whilst segregating individual site data.
(Example for illustrative purposes)
To give you an idea of the scale of the operation, Heinz, Mars, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Microsoft and BMW are all using EQMS. Each of those systems is shared with BT. We can provide further value to our customers by encouraging them to use the system internally and up their supply chains.
Carl Butler, Key Controls Manager at BT
3) Sodexo - share best practice with multiple sites
Global food services and facilities management company, Sodexo, have a similar architecture to BT - whereby each customer has a different instance of EQMS but is controlled by a central management system.
As Sodexo manages facilities for many heavily-regulated pharmaceuticals, the company must comply with the FDA, MHRA and other regulations.
To reduce time and administrative burden, and ensure all the necessary compliance documentation / audits, training records and issue are recorded, Sodexo uses a best practice configuration when implementing a new system.
(Example for illustrative purposes)
Our customers benefit in a number of different ways. First and foremost is that we're able to do something that our competitors are not. In many circumstances, our customers are dealing with Sodexo and lots of other service providers, and what happens is that, by using EQMS, Sodexo are able to improve the level of compliance that the customer can expect. Whether that's the effective closure of corrective actions, the effective management of risk, making sure that training has taken place or having all the documentation available.
EQMS answers all of our needs in terms of functionality. But the critical thing is that we've been able to validate the system to meet the very high demands of providing IT tools in a heavily-regulated pharmaceutical environment.
Carl Stanbridge, Global VP of Quality and Compliance at Sodexo
4) A B World Foods - a multi-lingual quality management system
Various brands under the A B World Foods umbrella, such as A B Agri, A B Connect, ASN Nutrition, use EQMS. Each brand has their own management system, available in the languages required.
EQMS is available in the most widely spoken languages, with other languages coming on stream throughout 2019.
(Example for illustrative purposes)
For more information about how we work with multi-site, multi-national organisations, download our enterprises case studies.
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