For a digital Quality Management System (eQMS) you do not need to invest heavily in dedicated Document Management Systems, you can build it in Confluence! Atlassian’s Confluence is an internal, online Wiki that helps (remote) teams to collaborate more efficiently.
Many companies use Confluence as a shared knowledge base because it has several very powerful benefits:
Shared meeting notes
One page that contains the notes of a meeting, that all attendees have access to. Containing the agenda, tasks and decisions. No longer searching your paper notebook for the notes of that meeting 3 months ago!
Google-like search for internal information
You never have to ask your colleagues where to find that one document in which directory on the fileserver. Perform a simple search in Confluence, which also searches the contents of your pages, unlike the windows search function that only searches filenames.
Hyperlinks
As an online tool, based on HTML, you can easily link to other pages with hyperlinks. Ever tried that in a Word document?
Assigning tasks
You can easily assign tasks to yourself or your colleagues, even with a deadline. Your own tasks appear in your personal tasks list.
Permissions
Not all internal information needs to be shared with everyone. You can use permissions to protect sensitive information.
Label information
Confluence also creates a page tree, similar to a directory tree. And on top of that you can use labels. Labels allow you to create your own list of pages with a certain label.
Affordable
Confluence is FREE for teams up to 10 people and very affordable for teams that are slightly bigger or want some additional features.
As such, Confluence is an indispensable tool that people use on a daily basis.
Moreover, Confluence has features (built-in or with the use of plugins) that make it a powerful Document Management System:
Page history (versioning)
On default, Confluence keeps your page history, so you can always look at previous page versions and see who wrote what and when.
Page approval
With the help of the Comala plugin, you can add approval workflows to your pages; pages can be in draft, under review, rejected and published.
Visual workflows
Using the plugin Draw.io you can create visual workflows on your pages and easily link workflow elements to other pages with hyperlinks.
Templates
You can create your own templates. For example you create a template for a CAPA. Then everyone starting a new CAPA will use the same template.
As a result you can build the documentation for your QMS in Confluence and because your team is already using Confluence intensively, your digital QMS is very accessible, unlike a dedicated QMS software that is only used by the quality manager in the weeks before an audit! And auditors love to see a QMS that is accessible and used by all employees.
QasE3D has created a QMS in Confluence for ISO13485.
