Rapidly changing technologies primarily drive Digital Transformation, but its adoption is dependent on a carefully planned out strategy. Big companies and organizations that adopt digital transformation have their goals and digitalization objectives predefined. It helps the process of digital conversion to be fully integrated into the business process rather than optimizing ad-hoc functionalities.
In short, the real benefits of digital transformation do not lie in optimizing individual technologies used but rather in the overall integration and dependencies of the whole system.
Quality dramatically impacts all aspects of business such as profitability, brand equity, and overall operational efficiency and business performance. Thus, an enterprise quality management system is placed at the core of the value chain of each business, and most medium-to-high-level enterprises implement it as the backbone of their business operations.
So let’s lay out a few steps to creating a digital transformation strategy for your eQMS integration.
Assess your quality capabilities – needs, strengths, and weaknesses
As mentioned above, you need to lay out a structure and define what quality management aspects you need to improve. Surely there are weak points in your workflow that need addressing both in technical and cultural aspects of your business operations. Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight, and as with any automation or new technology adoption, your business’s operational efficiency will be impacted. It will happen either because of new technology integration and its compliance with existing architecture, or training and education needed for it to be adopted by employees.
Understand Different Approaches That Can Be Taken
Enterprises try to integrate eQMS as an ad-hoc solution to solving specific pain points of the system such as CAPA and doc control. Again, a quality management system should be at the core of a value chain as it affects multiple modules such as CRM, MOM, PLM, and SCM. If ERP orchestrates the business processes, the eQMS plays a role in quality management throughout the whole process chain. If you are looking for a digital transformation of a specific aspect of a business, you should look into different approaches to achieve this. However, in the long term, a well-designed strategy around streamlined architecture backed with an eQMS is hugely beneficial.
Determine the gaps in functionalities and invest in IT architecture
We’ve already mentioned some of the main obstacles when adopting new technologies and making integration to existing business operations and workflow. The effect of this can be dampened by reevaluating the whole business operation processes and pointing out gaps in architecture and operational efficiency that could be improved. Investing in the IT architecture of one medium-to-large enterprise can present a considerable expense; however, if planned out correctly it gives a proportional ROI.
Your next step
Regardless of industry or organizational complexity, a great eQMS is defined by five essential elements – process integration, flexibility and extensibility of the system, centralized monitoring and management, compliance enablement, and culture and quality compliance. Most organizations today build their own QMS solutions or push ERP to their limits because they fear their business operational efficiency will be negatively hit throughout the transition period of digital transformation.
And this is where Intellect QMS comes into play. We’ve built an out-of-the-box eQMS that is compliant with most industries or business verticals. A solution that can be highly customized to adapt to your business processes and enable a smooth transition to the digital transformation of your Quality Management without damaging your workflow.
