Optimizing quality management in companies: 6 significant advantages of eQMS software

The performance of suppliers is extremely important, both in terms of a smooth manufacturing process and the quality of the end product. Quality management in small and medium-sized enterprises is therefore increasingly faced with the challenge of optimizing manufacturing processes and establishing digital ways to keep up with the competition.

Many companies in the SME sector are still trying to maintain their quality standards without additional quality management software (eQMS). However, the feared costs that a changeover undoubtedly entails are offset by a whole range of advantages that can become a decisive competitive advantage for SMEs.

Read on to find out what 6 advantages companies can gain from an integrated eQMS and how you can significantly improve your production processes - and therefore also your quality.

The automotive industry in particular is subject to particularly stringent requirements, which are defined in the globally applicable ISO 9001:2015 standards, the supplementary IATF 16949 standards for parts suppliers, and increasingly stringent customer specific requirements among others. For small and medium-sized companies, this means having to remain fast and flexible despite increasingly high requirements.

While maintaining a complex and intricate  quality management system, an eQMS is based on the current industry standards and norms and provides you with various tools and methods, such as 8D, Ishikawa, FMEA, APQP, and document management for the standard-compliant  maintenance  of quality processes in your company.

In order to cover the requirements of the standard etc., eQMS  already has a predefined process integrated. The standardized and structured recording of data enables a high level of process reliability, repeatability  and a low error rate.

The respective divisions often work with isolated solutions and frequently rely on manual Word and Excel lists that can only be accessed by one employee at a time. The spreadsheet program is misused to map the respective processes. There is also a loss of links. In order to maintain logical links between the information content of the various documents, time-consuming manual processing is required. If files are moved on the drives, the data can no longer be found. With a eQMS, the data is always available in context and only needs to be entered once.

Example: Sophisticated eQMS offers you the option of linking your FMEA and inspection planning, enabling you to process production documents consistently. By processing the data fields in a central location and then automatically synchronizing them in all relevant documents, you speed up the processes, save a considerable amount of time, create consistency and ensure that there are no failures.

Medium-sized companies often benefit from the knowledge of many years of experience. When an issue is discovered, the crucial question is: What went wrong? Why did the failure happen? And: How can the knowledge gained be stored in such a way that it is available to everyone later if required?

A final cause is detected via the cause chain and a measure is taken as a result. In the eQMS software, the chain of causes is recorded step by step, e.g. in complaints management, and can also be traced at a later date, as the knowledge is also anchored in the FMEA. The knowledge is thus stored in the software and the causality chain can also be traced later by every employee.

Through the interaction of the eQMS modules, you document the entire know-how of production and channel the information feedback from complaints and internal failure recording. By integrating this information and the resulting troubleshooting in the FMEA, you create the basis for preventive failure avoidance in your company!

With every entry in this central knowledge repository, you expand the quality know-how relating to your internal processes, your company, your employees and ultimately your entire processes!

New documents are created during every single company process. As complexity increases, so does the amount of data and files created.

Data records are often copied and overwritten without recording which document served as a template and which relationships existed - as a result, the consistency of the documents is lost.

The IATF 16949 standard and ISO 9001:2015, among others, require versioning and a defined document approval process. A eQMS  automatically archives and versions all project statuses and status reports. This means that a complete history or life cycle of the parts/documents, including drawings, is always available and there is no need for manual verification (file name, creator, date, version).

For audits, enormous effort is often put into preparations in advance. With a eQMS, the documentation runs continuously - so you are always ready for an audit, without additional effort!  

Sophisticated interfaces increase the efficiency of your processes even further: redundancies are avoided and valuable time and cost savings are made possible.

The most important interfaces at a glance:

• Master data and transaction data interfaces

  Master data for products, customers and suppliers usually has to be entered several times by different departments.

  By managing master data via a central interface, you have the option of reliably transferring data such as parts, business partners or customers, suppliers, employees or production facilities from external systems to the eQMS and keeping them synchronized.

  You can also transfer inspection orders (SPC and intermediate inspections), incoming goods, machine quantities etc. with the help of a transaction data interface. This makes it possible, for example, to check delivered goods for defects in the inspection data entry of your eQMS directly after system entry.

• Connection of measuring equipment

  Using an interface and direct data transfer, you can guarantee high data quality in a short space of time. This makes it possible, for example, to assign the measured actual values of electronic measuring equipment and 3D coordinate measuring machines directly to the corresponding inspection report items. The eQMS software gives you feedback on tolerances and informs you of deviations so that you can define and initiate specific measures.

In order to be economically well equipped, companies need secure, transparent and up-to-date information on all operating processes. Only with the help of meaningful evaluations will you be able to recognize warnings when limits are exceeded and initiate measures in good time. Ultimately, reliable evaluations create the indispensable basis for deriving reliable future forecasts for your company.

Creating evaluations based on Office documents is usually very time-consuming, as the information is distributed in different files. The creation of monthly reports can take 3-4 days.

In order to initiate targeted measures, analyses must be able to show defined focal points. With the support of the eQMS, they receive a quick overview of where action needs to be taken. As all data is available in a central database, quality data is immediately available and can be evaluated - queries only need to be defined once.

Conclusion

Unsatisfactory isolated solutions and fierce competition are challenges that small and medium-sized companies face in their quality management processes. The use of eQMS software offers companies great opportunities to remain competitive and continue to assert themselves on the market with strong products and convincing quality.

The advantages include, above all, the networking of different company divisions in order to be able to access important and cross-divisional contexts and links from all sources. Interfaces enable secure and error-free data transfer and continuous versioning provides security for certifications and audits.