What is in it?

So what you do with a Visual QMS sounds pretty straight-forward:

• Draw your Visual Processes to form an easily navigated, visual map
• Import your Regulatory Statements (ISO, etc.) into your requirement library
• Create a library for your Guiding Documents, with the right metadata for people to easily find their information and the right creation and approval flows to let the organization publish new content more easily.
• Set up the QMS Support modules you need to help standardize different tasks surrounding the Quality Assurance work, for example:
  • Training Management and Logging
  • Issue Recording and Management of Deviations
  • Internal Audit Management

How do I make it happen?

Depending on your goals, existing documentation and other things, the complexity of such a project may vary. If you are very ambitious you can implement a full total quality management system during the first implementation, complete with modules for Risk Management, Customer Feedback and more. You can also start out with a smaller scope and then add modules as you go along. If you only need the basics (i.e. get your processes captured and distributed, get control of your documents and connect them to your regulatory statements) to let the organization know how to succeed and comply, then it could be a smaller project.

We are currently writing a series on Getting started with Visual QMS, which goes deeper into how an implementation typically works.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us via email or book a personal demo with us.

The post What is a Visual QMS, and how do I get one? first appeared on Visual QMS.

Get a grip of your existing content

One early task is to get an understanding of the current documentation (policies, instructions, routines etc.) and plan how to prepare it for the QMS. This will help you when creating the framwork of you document library.

Prepare the metadata structure

Most document systems (even manual ones) have ways of categorizing the different data. How many types of guiding documents are there (policies, instructions, routines, etc.)? Are they connected to different process areas/department? Any other metadata? How should it look in the QMS?

Since our system bases many functions on metadata, how you structure it for your documents will determine how data can be found, sorted and processed. But no pressure: most things can also be changed later on.

Clean up your docs

It might be necessary to clean up in your document collection. This is a task that the Process Owners and their staff can look into, to ensure you only bring useful content over to the QMS.

It might also be good to take a look at the Templates for the documents: any updates needed?

If you have mainly content that is not managed by metadata (such as files in network folders, etc.), you nay want to collect the links to the files in an Excel file and list them together with their desired metadata, to keep track of them and make migration easier.

Set up Creation and Approval flows

Configuring the Controlled Document workflow for creation and approval of guiding content is an important milestone. This can be a straight-forward setup or it may require a bit of thinking, depending on the organization and its compliance needs. What does the organization behind the documents look like, how do they work and how many need to sign off on changes?

A good match has enough steps and approvers involved to ensure the company requirements are met through standardization and accountability when creating and updating documents, while also helping the company develop and approve changes and new additions more easily than in a manual process (complete with a form of version control that makes sense to the organization).

If you make the flow too complex, and it can become a hassle. Luckily, we have a couple of example flows you can either steal right off or customize to suit your needs. Other relevant flows to look into include automation for different other document tasks, including Document Retirement, GDPR/Data Privacy compliance and much more.

Populate the Controlled Document library

When the structure of the library is configured, it is time to start populating it with the vetted documents and (if needed) new additions. Migration of documents is generally easy with Visual QMS. Mass-uploading the documents and giving them the right metadata in one go by hand is usually possible. For really vast quantities of files or complex metadata structures, an automatic import can also be configured.

Our system is build on one of the leading Enterprise Content Management systems on the planet. If you want to learn more about the best way to manage documents for QMS and compliance, or if you have any general document management questions, please feel free to drop us a line or schedule a personal demo.

You can also take a look at our Live Demo over here, and try out the search functions and other features of our Quality Management System.

The post Setting up a Controlled Document library first appeared on Visual QMS.

Getting started with Process Mapping

When you make a map of your company processes, it is important that it is easily understood by the intended users. Otherwise it all goes down the drain. While there are many ways to map processes, we recommend using UPN (Universal Process Notation) for your Visual QMS. It is an intentionally simple notation language, where the map has several layers to ensure each screen is easy-to-understand and has room for links and other useful attachments on the boxes. You can read more about it in this PDF containing the latest version of UPN.

Starting at the top level of responsibility and progressing down from there, we put the Process Owners and their people to work at mapping the company process areas as-is. Mapping is typically done in workshops, where the project organization learn more about UPN and how to use the easy web tool as different leveles of the business processes are captured.

Level 1: The Company Top Level

The first milestone is to draw the Top Level of the Company, creating a birds-eye view and a common understanding of the Strategic, Operational and Supporting processes of the organization. A Top Level might look something like this:

Inspired by the APQC model, the Level 1 diagram contains each Process Area in our example company. It also shows the inputs and outputs connecting the different activities, as well as the company role responsible for each activity/Process Area at the bottom of each box.

Users can click on the boxes to drill down to deeper levels of documentation for each process area. How deep you decide to map each process may depend on many things, and there should also be a balance between information shown in the diagrams and what is relayed in attached documents.

Level 2: Process Area Top Levels

After the Company Top Level milestone, the next priority is to draw the Top Levels for the different Process Areas. Depending on your organization, they may be as complex or more complex than the Company Top level, or they can be much simpler. Here is an example of a simpler Top Level of a HR Process Area:

Level 3 and deeper levels

Below the Process Area top levels (Level 2), the organization can go deeper into detail for the Process Activities of each area (down to employee role level) as needed. Here is the drilldown to Box 3 in the example above, Induct new employee:

While it is useful to go over all the areas in the company value chain at least to some degree, the level of detail per process area may depend on many things. The depth of different process areas may also vary greatly depending on the level of commitment from the Process Owners and their staff. But deeper and more complex is not always better!

In some cases, an additional level can be useful to explain an activity better. In other cases, in particular when it comes to more detailed and specific instructions, a simple link attachment can send the user to an instruction file, template, site or a tutorial video that can explain it even better. The point of the map is to deliver process knowledge via simple screens on each level, that are useful to the reader.

In conclusion

It is common to find things out as you go a long with the workshops. A classic example would be: What happens between Sales and Delivery? Do we have a hand-over process?

The answer might surprise you.

After going as deep as you deem necessary for the purposes of the QMS and helping the staff succeed in their individual roles and understand the contexts of their work (and, of course, stay compliant!), the map should be ready for Launch. Post-launch, it is important to keep the Map (and its related content) up-to-date. We will look at different ways to ensure that it is in later posts.

Next up in the series: How to set up your library of Controlled Documents!

If you want to see an example of a process map, please feel free to browse our example map in our Live Demo.

Please feel free to contact us by email or schedule a personal demo if you want to learn more about UPN Processes or implementing a Visual QMS.

The post Creating the Visual Process Map first appeared on Visual QMS.

This is the start of a series of blog posts for how to set up a Visual Quality Management System to provides your company with an online manual to your processes, which can be used at different levels by all employees to ensure quality and compliance in their daily work. This post will introduce the main components of a visual QMS and the milestones for implementing one.

Process Documentation

• Draw a Visual Process Map using a smart web tool.
  • Start at the top level of responsibility and then continue deeper down to map the company business processes in as much detail as needed.
  • Link the Process Activities to their relevant guiding content, which allows the user to find it all in the same place; whether they arrive by navigating the process map, searching for documents etc.

Guiding Documents

• Set up and populate a library of Guiding Documents
  • Determine the document categories and other metadata.
  • Configure the flows for creation and approval of content.
  • Import and process the vetted, existing documents and Create new additions (if needed).

Compliance with Regulatory Statements

• Populate a library of Regulatory Statements (ISO standards etc.)
  • Import the Statements (usually, the vendor makes a CSV or similar file available).
    • They can also be manually created in our web tool.
  • Connect the statements to the other QMS content, such as Processes and Documents that deal with complying with them.

Note: If you have no regulatory statements such as ISO standards etc. to comply with, then this component may be skipped.

QMS Supporting activities

• Configure the core tools for standardizing the management of QMS supporting activities.
  • Manage training
    • Ensure that users are continually trained and reminded of their relevant guiding documents, process diagrams and other content.
    • Ensure training events logged and that missed and failed training events are followed up.
    • Integrate with external training systems (e.g. LinkedIn Learning).
  • Record issues and Manage deviations
    • Configure the system for logging and processing issues.
      • What happens with a recorded issues may differ, which is why it can easily be configured in Visual QMS.

Note: There are also many more modules which can be set up during the initial implementation or later (depending on the scope of the project), including Audit Management, advanced CAPA and much more. Learn more here

In the following blog posts, we will go into deeper detail with the listed subjects. Stay tuned! The next part is here: Creating the Visual Process Map.

You can try navigating an example version of a Visual Quality Management System here: https://visualqms.com/live-demo/

If you want to learn more, please feel free to contact us by email or schedule a personal demo of our solution to creating a Visual QMS.

The post Get started with Visual QMS first appeared on Visual QMS.