About Qualifyze
Qualifyze conducts audits at scale to the highest quality standard on the market, driven by the proprietary Qualifyze audit engine and platform, and a network of global auditing experts. They’ve helped over 300 pharma clients in hundreds of GxP audits. Qualifyze’s ultimate mission? To make audits viable for every company in the world, and so enable safe and sustainable supply chains.
Our customer success manager, Trine Michelsen, sat down with Qualifyze’s Head of Quality Carla Peraferrer Hereu to pick her brain and hear her take on Scilife.
Why Scilife? 3 Key Advantages.
Carla explained that Qualifyze started to grow very fast, yet the team was still taking a manual approach to many quality processes. It simply wasn’t sustainable, and the decision to search for external help in the form of an eQMS was made.
Carla highlights that Qualifyze had several important requirements when making their choice of eQMS service provider, including cost, tech know-how, and ease-of-use of the solution. Scilife met and exceeded these in several ways:
1. A partner to help digitally transform
Qualifyze is on a mission to be fully digital, and actively wanted to seek out a collaboration with a like-minded and tech-centric company. The goal? To digitalize all levels of the company. Scilife ticked these boxes, being digitally-savvy, fully cloud-based, and a niche expert in digitalizing the life sciences industry.
2. Flexible and scalable pricing model: pay-per-user
Scilife, compared with other solutions on the market, is extremely cost-effective. Pricing is based on number of users, rather than a standardized tier system, so it’s highly scalable and you only pay for what you actually need.
3. An eQMS that’s easy to learn, use, and scale up
Carla explains that Scilife is really user-friendly, something she immediately realized during her initial demo of the product. Other demos she had participated in previously with other service providers seemed much more complex from the user perspective, whereas Scilife really stood out.
She was won over by the fact that the platform is cloud-based, centralized and buildable with predesigned yet highly customizable modules. She likes to pick and choose the modules Qualifyze needs, which means she could begin small and work her way to more functionality as the company expands.
‘I picked and chose the modules Qualifyze needed, which means we could begin small and work our way to more functionality as the company expands.’
Carla Peraferrer Hereu
Head of Quality at Qualifyze
Adaptability to Scilife
When asked about how her team at Qualifyze reacted to the new solution, and how long it took everyone to get comfortable using Scilife, Carla reveals that her team are still learning, but most have picked the software up really fast. She mentions that those outside of QA might take a bit longer to learn, but that doesn’t reflect on the usability of the platform; rather the different user backgrounds and unfamiliarity with QA processes.
She goes on to praise the Scilife Trainings module, which her whole team are using and got up to speed with in no time at all.
When asked about data migration, she explains that it wasn't hard, migrating workflows and processes took a bit of time, but was feasible as the QMS was implemented in 2019
Notable Improvements
Carla discloses that training is usually a pain point for Qualifyze, and Scilife’s Training module has made this so much easier. She adds that it’s frustrating for her to chase people up about their training progress and send reminders manually, so she’s thrilled the whole process has become automated. Now, users receive their reminder notifications automatically, and it’s led to almost everyone completing their training by the deadline 100% of the time. It’s a huge company-wide improvement, Carla notes.
Carla also reveals that all QA workflows have improved, such as the internal CAPAs process (derived from customer audits), especially thanks to the automated reminder feature. She adds that now, she’s relying on Scilife 100% to keep her up to date with reminders.
Finally, Carla notes that Scilife has really helped Qualifyze in their quest for full digitalization, and this continues to save the company a lot of time.
Favorite Scilife features
Out of the different aspects of Scilife, Carla enjoys the following the most:
1. The Trainings Module
As Carla mentioned, Scilife’s Trainings module really boosts team productivity and continues to save managers a lot of hours thanks to automatic reminder notifications that make sure users complete their trainings on time. Carla enthuses that the team even registers things now that they didn't register before on the module, because it’s so easy to do. She adds that the next module she’s really excited about trying is Events, and that she loves the idea that events can be registered on the fly.
2. The onboarding, migration, and feedback meetings with the Scilife team
Carla describes the usefulness of virtual ‘face-to-face’ contact and personalized attention right from the start in shaping the platform to Qualifyze’s unique needs. She adds that the migration was also a handy excuse to clean up their pending admin, they had wanted to revise their processes for a long time, including integrating ISO requirements, so they did all this during the migration stage, so that starting with Scilife was a fresh beginning with everything in the system up to date.
She points out how pleased she is with Scilife’s eagerness to listen to feedback and willingness to constantly improve the platform and add new features.
‘Scilife really offers everything we want in an eQMS. If there’s something we can’t do with the platform yet we’ll either find an effective workaround, or, as is usually the case, Scilife will tell us that it’s a new feature already in the pipeline. Scilife is remarkably eager to improve by listening to their clients’.’
Carla Peraferrer Hereu
Head of Quality at Qualifyze
3. Scilife as a single source of truth
Carla affirms that the centralization of the Scilife platform dramatically improves productivity. The accessibility of everything from a single intuitive dashboard has rocketed engagement in the company.
4. Scilife digitalizes and streamlines quality processes
“Before Scilife we were doing digital rather than being digital by operating with a manual digital system in our training and internal operating practices, passing word docs and PDFs back and forth. Scilife really helped us transform into being fully digital." - Carla Peraferrer Hereu, Head of Quality, Qualifyze
5. Interrelated modules
Carla stresses how useful it is to have all Scilife modules seamlessly integrated. She especially enjoys that the CAPAs module is connected to the Events module, as it speeds up her workflows.
Peer Advice
When asked about her advice to peers when it comes to selecting the right eQMS for their companies, Carla points out that this depends on the characteristics of those companies, but recommends looking for a user-friendly, customizable solution and a service provider that has a background in your particular industry. Scilife, for example, is geared specifically to life science industries such as pharma, medical devices, biotech and ATMP, which are the industries of Qualifyze’s clients.
When questioned about tips for starting out with Scilife, Carla advises companies to make the most of Scilife’s initial onboarding trainings which are, in her eyes, indispensable. Secondly, she recommends making full use of Scilife’s knowledge base, as she finds it a great resource to answer any doubts.
To Sum it Up
Qualifyze has chosen Scilife as their partner eQMS in their growth journey as an audit service provider. To them, Scilife’s ability to listen and improve the platform based on client needs really sets it apart from other solutions on the market. Thanks to Scilife, processes that were digital yet still manual have been transformed to be centralized, easy to manage and streamlined. It’s saving time every day and boosting team productivity, so Qualifyze can focus on expansion and evolution.