Establishing an electronic (or enterprise) Quality Management System is an expensive undertaking. So is it worth it? What is the value of having a good quality system; one that is fully transparent, trackable, validated, and available at all times, from any location?
Put yourself in the place of an auditor. How confident are you in a company that has an established eQMS, compared to one that doesn’t? Just knowing that a company has spent the money on an eQMS shows me that the company realizes how important quality is, and they are willing to prove it.
Paper-based systems are notoriously tough to control; documents can get lost or destroyed, they are hard to track, challenging to keep updated, and this leads to problems when establishing root causes. Paper based systems also take up immense amounts of space (filled with costly fireproof cabinets). Would your CEO rather spend square footage on file cabinet space or on potential revenue areas? We all know that answer. The time saved by having all documents in one location, without manually filing (potential misfiling) and retrieving is significant – not to mention the cost of personnel to maintain the system can easily justify the cost of an eQMS.
In today’s quality minded atmosphere where the regulations are becoming more and more stringent, the question really isn’t can I afford an eQMS but rather can I afford not to. The calculus for us at Argonaut was easy: Our clients need the peace of mind an eQMS gives them. That’s why we chose to use MasterControl.
