Are you still managing quality with a legacy quality management system (QMS)? If so, you may be faced with less efficiency, higher costs and other downfalls that you may not have considered.

Legacy technology is simply not suited for the needs of today’s complex business environments. Let’s look into 5 pitfalls of legacy systems and how the cloud helps alleviate them.

1. Greater Costs

Traditional, on-premises legacy systems require ongoing maintenance and management, which is an additional strain on IT departments. The cost of managing these legacy or paper-based systems adds up over time. Cloud solutions provide a more robust and scalable solution to meet the needs of growing organizations.  Less dependence on internal resources means faster implementation as well as on-time maintenance and upgrades.

Transitioning to the cloud eliminates the IT burden and costs associated with maintaining and managing an on-premises QMS platform. It automates and streamlines processes for the quality management team, minimizing the manual tasks and rework that occurs with legacy quality systems.

2. Siloed Processes

Quality impacts every aspect of a life sciences manufacturer’s operations. However, with legacy QMSs the quality team typically operates in a silo, making it impossible to get insight into other systems in which key data resides. As a result, the quality team has limited visibility to valuable insights throughout the enterprise.

Cloud-based QMSs break down these silos, helping to improve efficiency and enabling organizations to respond quickly to quality events.

3. Less Visibility and Control

Siloed processes also lead to less visibility into the data, and as a result, less control. Cloud-based systems provide seamless integration, and real-time access to the data, ensuring that quality teams have visibility into all information across the enterprise.

Organizations can also extend this visibility to suppliers for greater control over quality. 

4. Higher Security Risk

Security of quality data is a top concern for life sciences manufacturers. While companies often felt that data needed to be on-premises to be secure, the digital revolution has shown that this is not the case. These manufacturers now understand that data is more secure when hosted in the cloud. This is because data breaches are more likely when security is managed by a small team of people. Legacy systems also keep data behind their own firewalls, which limits how often system penetration testing can be conducted.

Cloud systems offer a large team responsible for data security, enabling them to quickly identify security threats and ensure that client data is protected.

5. Lack of Scalability

Companies of all sizes need to grow, and the quality system should grow with them. This growth results in more data and more complexity to be managed, something that legacy QMSs are not equipped to handle.

Cloud-based systems are much easier to configure to meet changing needs. This enables organizations to scale up to add new users or new systems and suppliers to support growth.

Automation is Critical

To remain competitive in today’s business environment, organizations must have access to data—faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost. They also need to ensure the security of this data, not just within their four walls but also across the supplier network. Legacy systems don’t have the capabilities needed to accomplish this.

Cloud-based quality management systems offer significant benefits to life sciences manufacturers, helping to nurture growth, break down silos and provide visibility into all critical data.

Download this white paper to learn more about how a cloud-based quality management system can help benefit your organization.

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