1. Flexibility and Best Practices: Probably the most important consideration is the ability of the system to adapt to your existing business processes, and be flexible enough to change and improve as your processes change and improve. This may seem like a simple statement, but many times software vendors build their systems around a generic, best-practices approach that cannot be changed without substantial time and cost. These vendors want you to adapt your processes to their software, not the other way around. If your company has spent years developing and fine-tuning business processes, and upon purchasing a software system, you find yourself re-engineering your proven processes to fit within the software system’s limitations, you have compromised your efficiency.
2. Deployment: One of the key areas in today’s technological landscape is the variety of deployment options. There are several ways in which a solution can deploy their solution, and each has its own merit. However, each also has a cost associated with it:
On-Premises: The first is the traditional model, known as “on-Premises”. This is when a vendor will sell the software solution to the customer, and they will need to install the software into their IT environment, on their hardware. This is beneficial in that you are able to control the location of the solution, and you’ve made an upfront investment, but is often expensive in that you have to make that upfront investment, and also invest in not only the hardware to house it, but the IT resources to support it.
Hosted/Co-Located: The second method is hosting or Co-Location. This is a scenario in which you can purchase the solution and then have the vendor company host it for you, either in their environment or in the cloud. The Cloud is the more beneficial option here, in that it is usually a 3rd party who is in the business of maintaining a robust hosting architecture – you run little risk in the cloud of any downtime. However, like the On-Premises scenario, you may not be incurring cost to maintain the solution and related hardware, but you still are making an upfront investment in a solution.
Software as a Service (SaaS): The last is the Software as a Service model, or SaaS. SaaS is a subscription service that enables you to leverage the power of the software solution, with no IT resources and hardware overhead, but you do not actually own the software, you are simply paying for the rights to use it. This is a more cost-effective method for many smaller organization that do not necessarily have the cash reserves for an upfront investment, but it also means you do not own any software. In most cases this is good, because you have a greater level of flexibility in choice of a solution. Without any investment, you are not limited to changing your solution provider, and you can operate a bit more freely without any cost, IT or infrastructure overhead.
| A Note on SaaS: many vendors will offer SaaS at a low-cost because they are putting you on a multi-tenant environment. This is a little prohibitive, simply because a multi-tenant means that multiple companies are sharing the same instance of the solution, most likely in separated databases. This certainly may reduce the cost, but it also reduces your ability to change and configure the solution. You really want to look for a solution that offers a dedicated SaaS environment – this means that you get your own piece of the cloud, with your own personal solution, so you can be unlimited by the level of configuration and flexibility that the solution allows. With a dedicated SaaS environment, you get to have the system you want, without the costs associated with owning and investing in a solution in-house or hosted. |
3. Look and Feel: One of the more overlooked issues when selecting the software is the ability to “brand” the system with your organization’s look-and-feel. While many ask whether the system can be configured to meet their changing needs, the ability to change the colors, logos, fonts, and general layout of the navigators, forms and reports is usually an afterthought. Many systems will offer some level of configurability, but this will usually not extend to the layouts themselves. End users must contend with the vendor’s look-and-feel, which will be foreign to them. The ability to control all aspects of the software’s user interface helps user-acceptance of the software, and user buy-in is one of the major contributors to a software implementation’s success. In the age of Web-based applications, vendors can demonstrate flexibility by complying with Web user interface standards. Furthermore, they should be able to provide this control without the need to customize the software. When selecting a system, have a well-defined set of user interface requirements that will make the system work for you, and ensure that the system is able to meet those requirements without having to do extensive development.
User buy-in will skyrocket if the system uses familiar colors, layouts and concepts. There are systems in the market that provide 100% configurability of the user interface (the presentation layer), so that the system can be modified, without programming, to match the exact user interface standards implemented in other Web-based systems, such as the company’s intranet, or even the company’s external website. The ability to “brand” the system is a critical part of evaluating whether the new system will be a good fit.
When looking at how extensively the system’s user interface can be configured, look to systems that provide direct access to the presentation layer using standard web page design tools. This usually means the ability to change the layout without affecting the software’s functionality. Also, make sure that all aspects of the user interface are configurable, so a consistent look and feel can be implemented throughout.
4. Reporting: When you automate using a QMS, there is an enormous amount of data created. Without some means of easily accessing the data, the QMS makes it extremely difficult to derive trends and insights on the quality system. Users are left to their own devices to manually filter out the data, or even export the results into an external system for reporting. This is a time-consuming effort, and can lead to time management issues in finding the data, filtering the data and reporting on the data. Software systems will often offer some means of search capabilities, but this comes in many ways and may require administrative intervention. Having search capabilities is often not enough—the system should be able to search not only at the highest level, but also search on multiple criteria and search within records, or even within attachments embedded in records. At the same time, reporting on the data comes in many flavors.
Many software vendors consider reporting an afterthought in the development of their products—usually partnering with third party tools to help make sense of the data, but with only limited integration between the two systems. Others will embed reporting tools directly into their product, providing a more integrated method of pulling data across records within the system. When selecting a software solution, determine the types of searches and types of reports you need to generate, and require that the vendor is able to create such searches and generate the reports you need.
5. End-User Adoption: Typically, the team selecting a software system is made up of multiple areas—IT, Quality, Operations, Purchasing, and more. More often than not, the participants are manager-level, and are making the decision on behalf of themselves and the end users. The end users, while most likely the highest volume user, are more than likely not involved in the ultimate decision. Many software systems will have the technology and process management needed, but once implemented, the end users are lost. It doesn’t look familiar; it doesn’t look and feel right, and requires significant adjustment to get used to. Look and feel may not seem like a “deal breaker” but it can be a hindrance in the learning curve for many users, and cause delays in getting implemented and effective.
When selecting a software system, take into account the end user’s experience. Make sure the software can easily be configured to help the end user— whether it is familiar forms and layouts, even colors that match the corporate look. If you are replacing an existing system, see if you cannot match the new system’s look and feel, even the form layouts to the old system. This can make the transition much easier, and make the end users more productive right from the start.
So with these elements in mind, you can effectively plan out a QMS project that takes your functional requirements, builds out a process for finding, evaluating, and selecting a software solution. There are many factors out there, and your goal is to get the most functionality with the most cost-effective result possible.
Lower overhead deployments such as SaaS, built-in reporting, flexibility, and ease of use are all factors that put more power to your administrators, while keeping the costs lower than compared to more involved, custom-developed solutions.
Follow these rules, and you will be on your way to finding that happy medium where you can get a system that has much of the functionality you want, while being within a scope of a system you can afford.