How a quality leader at a nutraceutical manufacturer built a culture of continuous improvement using Unifize

Day one, you're engendering a culture of continuous improvement.

You don't know it. You don't see it till one day you turn around and say, Wow, everybody is rowing in the same direction.

And those are sort of these unintended, massively helpful consequence of rolling out Unifize that I saw is that communication breakdowns fell away, that visibility and unnecessary meetings and unnecessary emails and unnecessary phone calls went away.

And I genuinely could focus on doing my job better every day. And I truly believe across the organization that's true for everyone at all levels.

I'm the Director of Quality, Compliance and Formulation at Biovation Labs here in Salt Lake City, part of a larger organization, Wellful.

We have both internal and external customers is what I call that. We have the brands that are all under the Wellful umbrella, that we're all part of the same company and we're they're predominant, if not entire manufacturer for capsules and tablets here by Biovation.

At that point it was more about having electronic documentation and this was 2016.

SharePoint wasn't great. People didn't weren't apt to use MasterControl and it's a little clunky and arduous for the average user. And what I learned probably most notably was that if it's not designed to be easy for the user, then it's just another hurdle.

A lot of systems out there will offer you the digital signatures and 21 CFR part 11 compliance, which is the set of regulations that applies to digital documentation and signatures and Unifize, has this amazing approval workflows that we've used.

I mean, we use it for raw materials, for suppliers, for formulas, for quotes, for product release, for raw material, what I mean by that is they it's a button click just like a lot of digital signatures work, but built into it is automatic notifications.

Being able to real time collaborate about a Non-Conformance and again, an Out of Spec or even just we use what we've termed Observations.

They may not be a problem, but they could be a leading indicator of a problem and collaborating with decisions right then and there.

What used to take days, weeks, sometimes months is seconds and minutes.

The digital signature and approval workflows, streamline my Lot release on finished goods, as I mentioned, because before that was email back and forth. Now my quality supervisor uploads the test, uploads the CoA, clicks a button says, All right, I'm done, and it goes right to the customer because again, something that used to take days at times takes minutes at worst.

One huge advantage of Unifize and the collaborative environment that it has is that you can collaborate about a specific item and you can collaborate about many items simultaneously, and that cuts down time, obviously, but it also increases visibility, communication and effectiveness

because I can be I can knock through three or four things that normally would have taken days, weeks, months sitting at my computer all at once, and I can actually respond to people about that event in the in the environment right then and there and move on to the next one.

Unifize is amazing because it grows with you. It solves problems with you as the problems come up. So if a conversation or process doesn't exist, guess what?

You can make it exist right then and there. So it's more than just quality management. It started there for us, every time there's a problem now, people start coming to me and saying, Hey, could Unifize's do this?

And that's so unique. I've never seen that before in any company where I have people from maintenance or people from receiving or people from warehouse or various other areas coming to us to quality and saying, Hey, do you think that this could be a solution for us?

And it's so amazing to be able to say, Yeah, it is, let's do it.