First and foremost, can you please share with us a brief overview of your company? When was Qualtrax established and what are your goals? Who are the brains behind the company?
Qualtrax was founded in 1993 and became the first intranet product for supporting and maintaining regulatory requirements for document and data control. Qualtrax is an all-in-one compliance management solution. There are lots of brains on this team doing lots of different things. Our team is very collaborative with members located all over the place in both the United States and in the United Kingdom.
What industries do you serve?
We can serve any industry that has heavy compliance burdens. A few examples that come to mind are forensic labs, testing labs, clinical labs, environmental labs, manufacturing plants, cannabis labs, health labs, pharmaceutical companies, and organizations in the medical device field. Our customers are really diverse and include and come from the public and private sectors. We serve government agencies including organizations within the department of defense.
What exactly is an eQMS and how does it work? What makes it important for your customers?
An Electronic Quality Management System (eQMS) enables our customers to spend less time on the minute details of their quality system and allows them to spend more time on what’s important to their organization. We make it more efficient and streamline the administrative, in-the-weeds aspects of our customers’ work. Qualtrax includes important functions like process management and document control so that organizations can meet a wide range of compliance and accreditation needs.
Qualtrax is important for our customers because it creates consistency and visibility across the platform and at all levels of organization. We call it an eQMS, but you could also call it a business management solution because it helps the entire business.
What are some of the pressures in compliance and accreditation today? And how is Quatrax addressing these?
One of the biggest pressures is that compliance and accreditation requirements are always changing. Environmental labs in California are now required to implement a nationally accepted standard called the 2016 NELAC Institute (TNI) Standard. Additionally, Labs who want accreditation to ISO 17025 were faced with increased challenges when the standard changed a few years ago. Qualtrax makes it easy to incorporate new requirements into already existing processes by allowing our customers to configure their workflows to their ever-changing needs.
You mentioned that your product is configurable to the client’s needs. How does that work and what are the advantages?
It allows us to give customers an out-of-the-box solution that they can customize for the specific requirements of their organizations and accrediting bodies.
An example of this would be our best-in-class corrective action workflow that gives customers the ability to use an industry-vetted process out of the box or configure based on their own unique internal processes.
Tell us more about your workflows. What are their key features and capabilities? How do they compare to similar offerings available in the market?
What really sets us apart from other solutions is our configurability. Building new or modifying existing workflows allows the customer to include whatever information is most important to them and then to be able to report out on. We provide a variety of custom fields , which allows our customers to document specific information that they can also report on in the future.
On top of all of this, the automatic notification and reminders are very important to our customers in terms of internal accountability. No one wants to have to nag their co-workers or employees to get tasks done!
Can you provide us an example of how workflows might be useful?
Our Proficiency Test Monitoring Workflow is a good example. It helps labs keep track of the proficiency tests that they have purchased and assigned throughout the year as well as year after year. It provides accountability and visibility to the analysts they’re assigned to and even allows for an inconsistency review which launches a Corrective Action if needed.
Looking into the future, what are some market trends or technologies you see on the rise in the eQMS space and how is Qualtrax meeting these?
Like I said earlier, one industry we are paying special attention to is environmental labs. We know that the new TNI requirements many labs will be subject to soon will need innovative ways to maintain their accreditation and streamline their operations. We’ve created a set of automated workflows that are designed specifically for environmental labs to tackle this standard. Readers can find more information here- https://www.qualtrax.com/industries/testing-labs/environmental-labs/
We’ve also partnered with A2LA WorkPlace Training to create a new offering specifically for startup labs. It’s called the 17025 QuickStart Package and was designed to address the most common challenges to achieving and maintaining compliance to the ISO/IEC 17025 standard. We have a full page on that here – https://www.qualtrax.com/tools-tailored-to-your-industry/
Related Categories