ETQ headquartered in Burlington offers the ETQ Reliance Platform, a quality management solution designed to meet a business' unique quality needs and risks with an automated best practice-driven software solution.
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MasterControl Quality Excellence
Score 8.5 out of 10
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The MasterControl Quality Excellence suite bundles a number of products supporting work quality and compliance including training and exams, incidents and corrective actions (CA), documents and change, and other modules.
We did on-site day plus demos of three products. Having a specific criteria to evaluate the products against in a decision matrix format made the actual selection more objective. There are many products out there that do similar things to what Reliance does, so educate yourself …
ETQ Reliance is great for quality systems in which different levels of personnel are accessing common documents. The user interface and basic functionality is very intuitive, and thus easy to navigate for both novice and experienced technical users. It is also great at organizing tasks and maintaining document attributes. Overall, great for the purposes of an audit. For more advanced users, it may be limited in functionality. Data analytics and related visualization is more easily done after exporting data and manipulating in third-party software programs.
MasterControl is suited with lesson plans for particular subjects. Refresher classes/lessons make it easier to keep current on any information that may change. Less appropriate ways in which MasterControl is suited would not allow for more user-friendly/beginner ways of operating the site.
There is no trigger if there is a duplicate document in the system. Since each InfoCard has its document number, unless used simultaneously with someone else, there is no trigger for duplicate documents.
When searching and looking at all the documents on the system, it would be nice to have a time column showing when it was released. All I am currently going off of is taking the document number and the highest, but that also takes time.
You can't get rid of a subtype if you have data associated with it. So if you enter documents a certain way and your team decides to change how, things will be more efficient, etc. You can't delete that subtype until you remove all data from the system, even if you don't need some. It's a big task if you have been using it for a long time.
During the past five years, we expanded our business and its quality control, and we hadn't had any issues even when we grew the company's size around five times. The software has proved itself during these years, and now we rely on it heavily and don't think we need to switch to any other similar product in the near future.
MasterControl Quality Excellence is easy to use when you dedicate the time. However many companies do not have that bandwidth to learn the system and will not use the system until they have to. Unfortunately creating errors, mistakes that are hard to fix.
At the basic support level, you get adequate support, but you are likely to be passed around from one tech support rep to another even on the same problem. Some of the support staff are both technically strong and have good interpersonal communication skills, others less so for the latter. Recently it seems that ETQ wants to monetize more of their support services both in multi-level support as well as in seeming to move some services from included in annual support to a fee basis (for on-premise deployment).
The Technical Support team has grown exponentially over the last couple years. Some front line support staff are new to the system and so know less than the clients do. Back line staff are more seasoned and provide immediate assistance to the front line staff. They have an extensive knowledge bank to assist them as well as client access to most KB articles. Annual user group conference gives us chance to meet the support staff an also to resolve any outstanding issues. Any critical vendor notices are emailed immediately when found and a patch offered at the same time. These are rare, but quickly resolved.
Prior to ETQ we were using spreadsheets and shared drives and the ability to pull information was challenging. It was a very manual process done by many people. Now, it is somewhat manually input by one or two people and the retrieval of information can be done by anyone anywhere with ease.
so far Veeva seems to be more user friendly, more robust functionality, and good quality but 3 or 4 times the cost. MasterControl Quality Excellence is good quality, decent amount of functionality and much better bang for your buck.
Has saved a lot of time in preparing for audits. In an organization with multiple franchises, the cost savings from reduced man-hours is well in the $500K+ per year range.
Cloud capability has saved on document storage and hardware costs. The cost of storing online is low and has saved up to $100K per year in hardware and data maintenance costs.
Reduced need for third-party document control applications. ETQ Reliance has eliminated the need for other software applications to support quality document maintenance.
The system has prevented audit findings related to lack of training for operators since Mx contains a training check against key work instructions prior to allowing data entry.
Having a single source of truth for quality system data has meant that metrics can be set across multiple locations, and we are able to compare apples to apples which has allowed us to identify sites that are struggling and improve understanding at these locations.
MasterControl Quality Excellence actively engages customers for input into features and improvements. I have seen implementation of several features and fixes that we requested which have made using the system easier.
