Quality Software - Who uses software to manage your Quality System?

[EJE0622]

How many of you use some sort of software to manage your Quality System?? I have just gotten rid of all paper versions of most things and now using electronic. Most everything I do is in Microsoft Excel. Is this the norm or are there relatively cost effective software available? My program is relatively new and $15-$20K on a Quality software simply isn't feasible...

[Caster]

Quality Magazine has a buyers guide you can search.

This search seems to return the top 10 vendors that I know about.

http://www.qualitymag.com/softwareselector/results?prodid=492780&ls=167

Pretty much all vendors now sell by the module so you can keep costs down just getting what you need.

The way you are set up now works for many and it has the advantage of being free, something to think about.

Good luck!

[Murphys Law]

EJ: I've posted before but I converted my business groups entire Quality System to Sharepoint. It has an advantage in that it is just like an intranet where you can give other people read only or high level of controls. One of my first task was to migrate our management review off Excel and I reluctantly got involved in it. I spent one day with a contractor so came up to speed very quickly. I then used it to document all CSRs which go above our existing Quality system which was adopted Worldwide throughout our company. Previously each site was maintaining each CSR list which was always ripe for an audit finding.

I've even used it to design an FMEA. Our product development group use sharepoint to track their projects in APQP format.

Sharepoint 2007 has advanced features such as ability discussion boards and something I particularly like it's ability to support RSS feeds.

Sharepoint though requires some overhead. If you do it in house, you are going to need IT to run Sharepoint.

However, you can use 3rd party host services to host sharepoint for you. I have privately used Apptix.com sharepoint where I paid $50 per month. I believe you can have 50 users under that plan.