Quality management is important to your manufacturing operation. But it’s tough to find the right quality management solution to suit your organization because you have unique needs. You may face software validation regulations that require you to re-validate whenever your software is updated. You may have a need for more charts per project than your current quality software allows. Or perhaps you have talented people on staff who work with
ProFicient™ data or third-party software, and you’d like to see their talents put to good use for the betterment of your organization. Or you may just need more control of your quality software, generally speaking—a more customized version to suit your needs.
InfinityQS is happy to inform you that we offer a
dedicated version of our
ProFicient™ on Demand (PoD) cloud-based quality management software solution. If you want or need a greater measure of control over your quality management software, then this could be what you’re looking for. This blog will walk through the dedicated version of this powerful tool, from benefits to added touches that meet the needs of manufacturing organizations who need just a little more from their system.
What is ProFicient on Demand?
ProFicient on Demand—hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud—is the comprehensive, real-time quality solution used by leading manufacturers worldwide to improve product quality, reduce waste, and maintain regulatory compliance. With the power of more than 30 years of ProFicient development behind it, this powerful cloud-based version of our quality management solution dramatically reduces implementation time and improves visibility—so you can drive quality improvement initiatives across your entire enterprise.
What’s a Dedicated Subscription?
A dedicated PoD subscription is a separate PoD system that provides greater levels of flexibility and control. As opposed to being limited by standard PoD settings, you can create a
customized version of PoD that meets your specific needs.
Unlike our standard PoD offering—in which system resources are shared across multiple companies—a dedicated subscription provides an unshared pool of ProFicient application servers dedicated solely to your organization.
The Many Benefits of Dedicated PoD
The most obvious question that comes out of this discussion (in my humble opinion) is this: what, in particular, is a good reason for a company to look into a dedicated subscription? Glad you asked! There are, in fact,
many good reasons that your organization would/should consider moving into a dedicated PoD environment. The most important reason, I believe, is that software updates are performed based on your organization’s timeframe. Period. Let’s start here and list them out.
The new Dedicated PoD subscription provides a customized environment.
Software Validation
When InfinityQS is ready to update ProFicient on Demand, everyone gets the update all at once. Easy breezy. No questions asked. But what if your regulations state that every time your quality monitoring software is updated you must re-validate it?
Is it the right time for an update? Do you even have the time? What about the cost? And will you be ready when InfinityQS flips the switch to the next version?
In the U.S., software used in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries is regulated by the FDA—the rules are listed in
CFR Title 21. Software used for electronic record-keeping and electronic signatures, which applies to quality management systems, is covered by
21 CFR 11. This document states that validation is required “to ensure accuracy, reliability, consistent intended performance, and the ability to discern invalid or altered records.”
My Schedule, My Choice
ProFicient on Demand remains unchanged until you are ready to request an update. Do it when you’re ready. Your ProFicient software remains unchanged until you reach out and request the update. You might even miss an update or two. No matter. You get the updated software when it’s most convenient for you. Therefore, you are scheduling the accompanying validations based on your needs, saving time and money.
Charts, Charts, and More Charts
Who doesn’t love all those charts, am I right? Box-and-Whisker plots, X-bar charts, histograms, and all the rest. So many ways to use your SPC quality data. Control charts are used in a variety of ways, but on the shop floor, operators use them as a means of assessing, controlling, and ensuring the consistency of manufacturing processes. By controlling processes, operators can minimize significant process changes that can result in off-quality products. If you’re an organization that needs more, it’s great to know that Dedicated PoD enables you to create more (a lot more) than just the standard 20 charts per project.
We have historically controlled the number of charts to protect both the customer and the environment—it takes additional computing power to render more than the 20 we offer in standard PoD. But, over the years, some customers have asked us to increase that, so we delivered…in a Dedicated PoD environment you can have up to 100.
Disseminating Those Charts
Some customers have expressed a desire to be able to automatically email charts, graphs, or reports. While standard PoD does not offer this function, we’re happy to report that the Dedicated PoD subscription can help you with that. In many cases, the number of seats for your quality management software is limited to shop-floor and quality personnel; managers might not have enough need for the software. But if they ever wanted a chart quickly emailed over for analysis, this is how you’d do that. The manager would never need to log into another software application; they would just receive it in their inbox.
Non-InfinityQS Software
Some customers have some really savvy software developers or administrators on staff who can add value to their InfinityQS quality management system through add-ons or manipulating their environment. They’re writing data to, or reading data from, their ProFicient database for specific purposes.
Any integrations with non-InfinityQS software, specifically where that software is touching the database, is not allowed in the standard PoD package. But with Dedicated PoD, third-party software is allowed. This can really help an organization that wants to maximize the value of their in-house software experts and raise their quality management game to the next level.
Session Timeout Settings
Standard PoD has a timeout setting that if an end user leaves their workstation, and there's no keyboard or mouse activity for a specified period of time, PoD will terminate the session and the user will need to log back in. Kind of like your monitor going to sleep on your PC.
Some companies have business processes that just take a long time, sometimes hours. Why would an operator sit by the computer while a process runs, when there are so many other things they could be doing? When they come back to their computer, they would need to log back in. Do that enough times and it gets frustrating. Operators are busy people. Why frustrate them further with something liked timed-out sessions?
Add Computing Resources
As mentioned above in
Charts, Charts, and More Charts, computing power is essential to many companies. They want to be able to do as much as they can with things like charts, and computing speed. Some folks just want the race car when it comes to computing power. Reminiscent of the discussion of
Session Timeout Settings, some companies don’t want their end users (i.e., busy operators) to have to wait for a chart to render or an application to open. With this in mind, Dedicated PoD offers additional computing resources to anyone who feels they need them.
And, one last thing…when you order the Dedicated ProFicient on Demand, if you feel you have a unique need (specific charts or reports or whatever it may be)—bring it up! We’ll discuss it with you, and there’s a good chance we might implement it! Say it with me…”customization”…
Roundup
To bring all this information about Dedicated PoD together, let’s think about what this means in the end to those who choose to adopt such a system. It means greater flexibility and control, reduced validation time and costs, and the expanded functionality and customized user experience that can help just about any manufacturing company meet their quality goals.
Take advantage of the technology at your fingertips today: contact one of our account managers (1.800.772.7978 or
via our website) for more information.