Item: MasterControl Quality Excellence
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MasterControl Quality Excellence

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our life sciences organization, we use MasterControl Quality Excellence primarily for document control, training management, and quality events management, such as CAPAs, Deviations, Nonconformances and OOS/OOT. MasterControl addresses key business challenges related to compliance, efficiency, and risk mitigation. Specifically, it helps us maintain control over critical documentation, ensures employee training is up-to-date and audit-ready, and streamlines the tracking and resolution of quality events. The scope of our use case spans across regulatory compliance, operational efficiency, and continuous quality improvement within a highly regulated environment.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Document Review and Revision, with the ability allow users to collaborate on the same document while keeping records of all previous documents that have been modified during the revision process. The document history and audit trail are also excellent, which plays an important role in life sciences industries and support the teams during audits and inspections.
Each user has a training folder, which allows their direct supervisors to easily visualize past and future trainings, as well as assign retraining on a particular course.
The access to system features is done via "stackable" roles, which allow SysAdmins to control which individuals have access to. Some systems allow extra access to document owners, while giving insufficient access to users that are not a module designer, for example. With MasterControl it is possible to customize the access the individuals can have in the system.

Cons

The search feature on the Training Module could be improved, as it does not always capture specifically what we are looking for.
The disabling account process could be improved, as most of it does not allow the user to be removed (only replaced), which requires a lot of manual labor.
I wish SysAdmins could have more freedom when it comes to make fields required /not-required on document infocards.

Return on Investment

I was able to eliminate a QA Admin position in the QAU by digitalizing a process that was paper-based. All requests, signatures and archival of a specific document was transferred into MasterControl, which reduced the completion time from multiple days to hours. Additionally, due to the electronic signatures, the new process in MasterControl was compliant with life sciences regulations.

Usability

Some tasks require the users and SysAdmin to access multiple modules at a time. For example: to create a training course and an exam for a document in the system, the user needs to finish creating the document in the doc module, then go to the training module to create a course and an exam separately.
Ideally, from the document page we should be able to access the training course, which could have some fields auto-populated. And from there, also create and link an exam, all without leaving the document page.

Alternatives Considered

MasterControl seems to be better suited for life sciences industries, as the out of the box configuration is more strict. In terms of end users, the MasterControl layout looks more user friendly when compared to others.

Key Insights

Do you think MasterControl Quality Excellence delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with MasterControl Quality Excellence's feature set?

Yes

Did MasterControl Quality Excellence live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of MasterControl Quality Excellence go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy MasterControl Quality Excellence again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

MasterControl is well suited for life sciences industries and it has specific features that facilitate the configuration of multi-site organizations. Although, it is less appropriate when there is a need for the different locations to customize some features, such as document configuration. The current configuration does not allow SysAdmins to modify documents metadata.

Comments

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Best option for Life Sciences organizations