We have had a lot of experience with Q-Pulse (the Scottish program) When we started my client company had zero idea that quality was about numbers as well as documentation, so it helped there. Q-P got us started and produced some graphs. We very quickly found its limitations, and they were many.

It is entirely self contained, only trivial export, import or linking, so no graphs relating to production quantities. Customisation is hugely expensive. As is ongoing support and licensing It crashes far too often, even on a well run network. Not a Windows program It is not at all intuitive to use, getting line supervisors or goods-in people to enter stuff is just too difficult It is very Quality Manager centred, e.g. a user of the controlled documents cannot get a list of what is applicable to him. For us, it misses out a stage in the quality control loop. It expects every non-conformance to have a corrective and a preventive action. The idea of doing a Pareto and doing preventive action on a group of n/cs hasn't been incorporated. The support people know their stuff technically, but Q-P themselves are not receptive to ideas.

Now we are re-doing chunks of it in Access, modelling the work flow, and everyone is breathing a sigh of relief.

I went to a seminar on something else full of consultants, and someone mentioned this, and nearly everyone said it was too cumbersome.

There must be something better out there, but I don't know what it is. When you find it let me know!

Regards