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Levi Olmstead
A quality management system (QMS) is a type of enterprise software used by organizations to vet internal processes, workflows, products, and conventions – across their entire value chain – to ensure that they adhere to industry and regulatory standards.
At its core, a QMS is a set of processes, policies, and procedures designed to ensure that a company’s products or services consistently meet or exceed customer expectations. It’s like a well-organized playbook that guides everyone in the company on how to maintain and improve quality. The software angle makes it more accessible and flexible to integrate into workers’ workflows, especially if an organization’s employees are primarily knowledge workers.
Quality management systems are used by many different business sectors, with manufacturing, life sciences, pharmaceutical, packaging, aviation, medical devices, healthcare, and food & beverage companies being the core industries driving QMS adoption.
But simply investing in a QMS won’t streamline and transform your quality assurance processes. Enterprise IT teams are faced with implementing the new QMS, which requires planning, beta testing, training and supporting end-users, accelerating end-user adoption, and providing constant application maintenance and improvement.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to successfully implement a new QMS system, as well as how to drive end-user adoption by enabling your employees with contextual onboarding, in-app guidance, and real-time end-user support.
Implementing a quality management system has a direct impact on an organization’s risk management, compliance, change control, product and service quality, operational efficiency, employee productivity, and ultimately, revenue.
Consequently, it requires the entire organization’s involvement to implement a QMS and maximize its capabilities continuously and successfully.
While every QMS implementation will have contextual requirements and challenges based on an organization’s desired outcomes, industry, and use cases – there are still common steps to implement a new QMS instance and ensure success, including:
First, you must understand your major stakeholders’ expectations and get their buy-in to help you.
But ultimately, the true impact of a quality management system manifests through the frontline workers who use it to vet products and ensure standards are adhered to. And that’s why your software implementation journey needs to start with those end-users.
The consultation stage ensures you’re aligned with your organization’s short and long-term goals and paves the way for effective quality management.
Measurable goals will guide the operational choices you make during your QMS deployment and will help you prioritize function over form/convention.
Some examples of measurable objectives nailed down with realistic metrics include:
Each of these is not a pie-in-the-sky, wishy-washy assumption—they are measurable goals and have an accompanying metric you can look at after two quarters, one year, or six months to determine whether or not your QMS investment is turning a positive ROI and the business outcomes you set out to achieve when implementing a QMS.
Mapping business processes allows organizations to identify redundancies and build efficiency into your organization’s structure so that you can complete processes faster and reduce cycle costs significantly. Within the context of a QMS implementation, mapping related processes helps stakeholders:
Like in most digital transformation efforts, the makeup of your QMS implementation team depends on the size of your company and the complexity of the platform you’re adopting. For instance, a smaller firm might need just a handful of consultants with each filling multiple roles, while an enterprise might have to bring in a specialized agency with a double-digit amount of experts, including:
Likewise, your change management strategy should account for:
Quality management systems are simply a technology and it’s usefulness is limited by how much the end-users understand the platform, including how to navigate its UI, how to complete its processes contextual to their organization, and how to complete their daily tasks and responsibilities with it.
A robust training strategy enables end-users to connect the QMS’s functionality with their day-to-day workflows. This empowers end-users to understand its benefits and why they need to adopt its new processes to ensure:
With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, IT teams can accelerate QMS adoption by enabling end-users with in-app guided onboarding and continuous training right inside their QMS.
With Whatfix’s no-code editor, create contextual guided Flows, in-app Task Lists, Pop-Ups, Field Validations, Smart Tips, and more – all providing moment-of-need support and reinforcement learning for different types of end-users, depending on their role and where they are inside your QMS.
Software clicks better with Whatfix's digital adoption platform
Enable your employees with in-app guidance, self-help support, process changes alerts, pop-ups for department announcements, and field validations to improve data accuracy.
A limited launch helps you test your QMS capabilities in a sandbox to understand how quickly your end-users can adopt it in practice, measure feature engagement rates, and track how the QMS improves your compliance, quality, and performance metrics.
Throughout the process, though, your ultimate goal should be to collect actionable feedback and engage with your testers to understand how much the QMS improves or retards their normal workflow, plus any changes they suggest to improve outcomes.
With a DAP like Whatfix, CIOs and IT teams can use a no-code platform to create in-app surveys to collect end-user feedback right inside their QMS application. This enables IT teams to collect qualitative feedback from real end-users directly inside the QMS – helping to identify bugs, end-user pain points, and understand user experience.
These surveys can also collect feedback throughout a QMS lifecycle post-implementation, such as suggestions on workflow improvements and areas of confusion, or identifying gaps in end-user support and help resources.
After you connect your QMS with the rest of your systems and processes in a live environment, you need to create reliable, on-demand support channels for your end-users to access the help they need at their own pace, when they need it.
The only way to guarantee that is with on-demand end-user support. This includes enabling your end-users with internal wikis, pre-recorded videos and explainers, step-by-step guides, in-app guidance like interactive walkthroughs and tooltips, searchable product documentation, notes, and contextual notifications that pop up just in time to guide users through completing specific tasks and resolving errors.
With a DAP like Whatfix, IT teams can enable QMS end-users with real-time, self-help user support with Self Help. Self Help connects and automatically crawls all of your organization’s cloud storage and drives, internal wikis, process documentation, onboarding and training materials, IT help desk, IT knowledge articles, video and screen recording tutorials, third-party links, and more – and then organizes them in a searchable Self Help wiki that overlays on your QMS’s UI.
Self Help also connects your in-app guided Flows, Tours, and Smart Tips, helping to provide further guidance. End-users are presented with contextual recommendations based on where they are inside your QMS, as well as their role within your company.
Above: Enable your employees with contextual user support and accelerate IT adoption with Whatfix's digital adoption platform.
The Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform empowers IT teams to create in-app guidance and self-service user support on all internal desktop, web, and mobile applications. Enable employees with Self Help, which overlays onto your CRM, HCM, ERP, CPQ, and other digital workplace applications. Self Help connects to your process and IT documentation, LMS, video tutorials, onboarding documents, and other IT support-related content to provide employees self-help, at the moment of need. Create additional in-app guidance and pop-ups to contextually guide users through applications and alert them to process changes.
Like every piece of enterprise software, a quality management system is a dynamic, multi-purpose tool and your workforce will interact with it in different ways, modify it slightly to fit their workflows, build clever workarounds to evade issues they encounter, and generally customize it as much as possible without breaking the system.
Instead of trying to enforce strict adherence, what you need is to observe how your end-users interact with your QMS, find patterns in end-user usage behavior, and optimize your quality management system’s user interface to sync with your employees’ workflows.
A product analytics platform like Whatfix can help you understand how your end-users are engaging, using, and adopting your QMS with user behavioral analytics. This enables IT teams to map user flows, build the most efficient processes, identify end-user friction points, and extract data that provides actionable insights to make your QMS user experience and workflows as intuitive for users that enables them to maximize their productivity with the platform, regardless of their technical abilities.
With Whatfix’s digital adoption platform and analytics suite, analyze, build, and deliver better end-user experiences to accelerate technology adoption and enable end-users to maximize software usage. Whatfix’s no-code system enables IT teams to analyze and measure digital adoption and product usage, create in-app guidance, and provide self-help user support.
At every stage of the QMS implementation process, your goal isn’t to improve technical efficiency and capability since most QMS platforms are state-of-the-art software. The bigger challenge for IT teams is to ensure your end-users are trained to extract maximum value from the QMS’s functionality through digital adoption.
Whatfix is a digital guidance and user engagement platform that enables enterprises to maximize ROI from software by enabling end-user adoption of complicated software tools and their custom-built processes through analyzing end-user behavior, creating in-app end-user guidance and real-time support, and engaging end-users with contextual information.
With Whatfix, IT teams can drive QMS adoption by:
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