Collaborating with Colleagues using QA Assistant Studio

Collaborate with Colleagues using QA Assistant Studio

Collaborating allows designated users to share specific information with other companies and individuals. This may be useful, for example when working collaboratively with another customer, supplier or consultant who has a QA Assistant Studio account.

The QA Assistant Studio settings governs which information members with 'Collaborate' privileges may share with those other companies directly through the software. These settings keep you and your organisation in full control of what information is shared and to whom it is shared to at all times.

Let's take an example of a manufacturing company located in Michigan who imports components from a company in Spain.

Both companies need to collaborate on FMEAs, Control Plans and Process Flows together. Using the Excel method this would become confusing and cumbersome. Changes made to the documents may not filter through to the supplier and vice versa.

With the QA Assistant Studio accounts, both companies can collaborate on APQP documents, even from different parts of the world. Let's say an engineer from the manufacturing company sets up a dFMEA. The engineer can then add members to the team of the dFMEA from the manufacturing company and the supplier company. The team member from the supplier company can then log on to the dFMEA document and make changes. All changes to the dFMEA are logged in the document history, so that both engineers can quite quickly see any changes that have occurred. This also means that both engineers are working on documents containing the most recent live information and there is no confusion over revision control.

The engineers can also schedule and set document reminders for each of the fields in the APQP documents. QA Assistant Studio then automatically generates and sends emails to the specified action owners.

The manufacturing and supplier engineers can also collaborate on projects using QA Assistant Studio's Project Assistant. Again the engineer from the manufacturing company can add the engineer from the supplier company to the project team. The supplier team can easily and quickly see project information, for example, members of the team, a list of documents that relate to that project, sub projects and even create a Bill of Materials. This will greatly improve the efficiency and time spent on preparing for ISO/TS audits.

The engineers may also manage the important aspects of a product's life-cycle with ease using the Project Planning tools. Both engineers can agree on Project Milestones, assign responsibility for these milestones and set target & actual milestone dates. The engineers have a clear overall view of the status of the project at all times.

In the example, the manufacturing engineer has full control over the access to the APQP documents and the Project information at all times.

The real beauty of QA Assistant Studio's collaborative functionality is that engineers from different companies and different parts of the world (even if it is only down the road!) can work on the same documents, FMEA, Control Plans & Process Flows and share the same project information.

If you don't already have a license, why not apply for a 30 Day Free Trial and find out more about collaborating!