ETQ 2019 Briefing Note
By: Sandra K. Rodriguez, Market Analyst
Axendia was recently briefed by the Executive Team of ETQ. Headquartered in Boston, ETQ has 27 years of quality management experience. The company believes that competitive advantage grows when companies take a differentiated and agile approach to quality management.
“Our highly regulated customers in Life Sciences and Food and Beverage are aware of the regulatory consequences of poor quality and are looking to address these issues across all phases of their supply chain and manufacturing process – starting with product design,” began Nina McIntyre, Chief Marketing Officer at ETQ.
The actual management of quality from a sales perspective and the entire complaints management aspect of the product life cycle, is something that is critical in Life Sciences and all of the Industries in which ETQ does business. ETQ’s flagship Quality Management System – Reliance, is assuring quality outcomes for some of the world’s most demanding brands in medical devices, pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, etc.
“Our focus at ETQ is to deliver a QMS that is not only broad and rich with best practices, but agile and flexible so that the business can respond to the environment and make quality management processes just right for them,” continued McIntrye. While Life Science companies are looking for a QMS that has industry best practices built in, ETQ recognizes that companies also have processes that are unique to their business. “Their method of bringing product to market is where they gain their competitive advantage and differentiation. So, those fundamental practices need to be enhanced to be just right for them,” said McIntrye.
Because change is constant in business – new products, markets, regulations, mergers and acquisitions – systems need to be agile. “We wanted to make sure that customers could have an easy and quick out-of- the- box experience,” commented Morgan Palmer, Chief Technology Officer at ETQ . Reliance consists of a wide variety of applications that automate standard quality management processes in the cloud, based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Infrastructure.
The Reliance platform consists of 8 solution sets:
- Quality Essentials – Documentation Control, Audit Management, Change Management, etc.
- Quality by Design – Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP), Product Specification Management, etc.
- Supply Chain Quality – Supplier Corrective Action, Material Qualification, Supplier Rating, etc.
- Nonconformance Handling – Inspection and Testing, Nonconformance Reporting, Planned Deviations, etc.
- Health & Safety – Safety Data Sheets, Job Safety Analysis, Accidents and Safety Reporting, etc.
- Environmental Management – Permit Control, Chemical Approval, etc.
- Enterprise Risk Management -Emergency Preparedness, Risk Surveys, Quality Records Disposition, etc.
- Complaints Management –21 CFR Part 11, Complaint Handling and Validation Package
ETQ also has a very powerful and newly released analytics platform called ETQ Insights. Insights is a visual dashboard and advanced visual analytics tool that brings together data across the different Reliance applications. Insights can answer very specific questions that customers may have on things like timeliness of workflows or aging of their quality issues. “With Reliance Insights we can now, in a very efficient way, extract and convert the data that’s inside Reliance, put it into a data lake specific for analytics. And on top of that, we have some very sophisticated visualizations that allow for filtering and drill down interactions …it’s a paradigm our customers have told us they are looking for within ETQ,” said Palmer.
Just like the platform has multiple components, ETQ Insights has a data synchronization layer, which does the transformation. There are two benefits: it creates better performance and synchronization; and the ability to pull out all of the semantic layers of the terminology that the users have configured inside ETQ. “So, they’re not looking at database names or table names or column names. They’re looking at user-friendly data elements, within Reliance itself based on their own terminology,” added Palmer.
ETQ can also synchronize the security model to ensure users only have access to the data they need inside ETQ Insights. The quality data lake can be accessed directly by customers as well. Although many ETQ customers are building out their own data lakes, they are seeking to supplement this information with a dedicated quality data lake or data warehouse.
Fairly unique to the marketplace is ETQ’s online training platform, ETQ Academy. “We came out with it a couple of years ago. The platform is unique in terms of what it offers and the breadth of what it offers. It basically allows Reliance users and administrators to be self-sufficient by taking advantage of a variety of training options that are available online 24/7 and run the gamut from brief “micro-learnings” to full certifications. Academy basically allows Reliance customers to access training whenever they want, wherever they are and in the best scope and format for their needs,” continued Palmer.
Also noteworthy is that one-hundred-percent of ETQ’s new customers are taking a cloud-first approach. This is further proof that Life-Science companies are becoming more cloud comfortable.
In Brief
The ETQ Reliance platform consists of 8 solution sets, that are made up of forty applications. ETQ’s QMS has the ability to address broad business requirements with the flexibility that leading quality organizations are leveraging to differentiate themselves. Insights is a powerful analytics tool that provides rich visual dashboards in support of quality management.
We will continue to monitor the ETQ Reliance platform and provide periodic updates.
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