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 8.1 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 very flexible in all modules. A manufacturing department and a nursing unit can both use the same modules with all their needs met. System configuration can be accomplished at a broad and or granular level. Each document, incident, user etc can have a customized configuration for its unique workflow. The application is web-based and available on a variety of platforms. Security allows staff to access what they need from the workplace, remotely from a client site to home. While I work in healthcare, I can talk to other MasterControl clients in the oil industry or Pharma and we still can provide suggestions to each other about new or unique uses for MasterControl. I
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.
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.
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.
SharePoint and DocSTAR were reviewed as well as 6 others. None of them provided that flexibility that MasterControl did. MasterControl had all the whistles and bells other systems did, but it offered for customizations to let us include clinical ancillary services, nursing units, outpatient clinics, product manufacturing etc. All its modules are linked together so processes are streamlined and automated. The cost is more than several other systems, but it makes up for it in its customer service and flexibility. MasterControl does value its customers and does take client suggestions to new enhancements routinely. Clients routinely get together on virtual meetings to assist each other and provide suggestions to MasterControl.
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.
