Ideagen Quality Management (formerly Q-Pulse, Qualtrax and Qadex) integrates with an organization's existing processes and acts as the backbone of its processes, providing workflow automations and comprehensive document management, enabling teams to identify and rectify any issues before they arise. This solution is designed to elevate an organization's performance with digital quality management 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.
Truthfully, there is no scenario where I cannot see Ideagen being beneficial to a company. The ability for a company to have it's staff trained remotely is invaluable, as most of the world now lives virtually. Couple that with the advantage of giving persons access to other modules, which may not be officially assigned to them, persons can continue to make themselves more marketable with continued learning.
This system has made it very easy to keep our records straight and cleaned up. We have the choice to make them released or leave them in draft. If used appropriately, there is only one of each document that can be constantly revved up instead of having so many different versions of a PDF on our company's server that could even be corrupted. The history of each version is tracked, and you can see all the changes in one area. It is hard to see if there are copies in the system, and that can be hard. I have trained my end users to search before putting in another document, but that doesn't always happen. If they are not writing why they have something in the system or the changes from each revision, you will have to do more searching yourself or have to ask that person. So sometimes it's an end-user error.
The training module is basic. If your training program is more complicated than simple onboarding training, then the Q-Pulse training module will be a bit of a challenge. It's not impossible to use, but there are better programs out there. I understand though, that this is an area that is being improved on soon.
Their new report writer is not user friendly yet. MasterControl has listened to its clients and have been making small changes to assist reporting. There is still room for improvement though.
Rapid company growth means many new staff. Some tech support staff know less than the customers they are supporting.
Q-Pulse QMS is totally integrated into our organization now. It does the job nicely and to change it would cause unnecessary disruption to our operation.
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.
The flexibility of use is very good. The workflows can be applied to a lot of different areas of the business and they're not difficult to build. Users can run reports and track progress of employee training compliance. Usability to me includes the experience aspect and the UI is a little tired. Re-working the front end for organizational purposes along with look and feel would keep this app fresh.
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.
The support team for Q-Pulse QMS is fantastic. Ideagen has invested a lot in this area, opening offices all around the world. Q-Pulse QMS product managers are also very responsive to requests and improvement suggestions. Ideagen also hosts annual conferences, which bring their customers together where ideas can be shared and we can meet the people developing the program.
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.
I was not involved in solution selection, but this solution is fit for purpose for a number of different tools that we could be paying for as well. We are not purchasing an HR workflow tool because the workflows accommodate most of our needs and the one that it doesn't aren't necessarily appropriate anyway. Regulatory software validations are performed in Ideagen because the overhead of a software specific tool is more that what we require. The upside is that all of those records are in a consolidated location for an audit.
Hands down, MasterControl Quality Excellence worked a million times better than SmartSolve. While SmartSolve was definitely cheaper, we struggled with that system immensely and it only had documents and training for corporate functions because after implementation, it was clear that it would be a difficult solution for our old Lotus Notes based systems. MasterControl Quality Excellence has been a great solution and enabled us to retire all but one of our old Lotus Notes databases (out of hundreds).
We have been able to whittle down the number of databases that our documents are kept in from well over 50 to a single location in MasterControl.
We've been able to convert paper training records into electronic training records when using MasterControl, which is saved a lot of time on the production floor keeping track of training.
By having the same tool and format across multiple places in the business it has helped the organization become more efficient.
