Qualtrax Compliance Software

Maintaining your department's Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) is necessary, but it's not an easy project to handle manually. There are lots of police departments that are using shared network drives to manage documentation, and in a lot of cases, paper systems to manage accreditation. These types of systems can be hard to manage, navigate, and are very prone to error, lost documentation, and incomplete SOP management. Many police departments have a very small staff or limited resources, so managing SOPs consumes at least one full-time resource and leaves you short-staffed.

Problem: Rachel is working on making an update to the department's SOPs. Rachel has to dig through the departments' electronic files to makes sure she's go the most recent version of the SOPs, make the changes, and then she has to track down the correct person in the department to update the documentation and approve its accuracy. Rachel also has to make sure that all of the newly outdated SOPs are collected and replaced with the newest revision.

Solution: Using Qualtrax, the department's SOPs are being controlled in Qualtrax. This means that everyone who needs access to the SOPs will have access to only the most current revision. Changes to the SOPs are made within Qualtrax by the person responsible for updating them, and then they go through an electronic approval process before being made available. At that time, if you'd like, you can have all employees complete a test acknowledging that they've seen the most recent revision of the SOPs and that can be tracked in a training record. You can run a report to see who hasn't acknowledged receipt of the newest revision. Also, all past revisions are also stored in Qualtrax so you can quickly reference the previous revisions, who made changes, and what was changed—all of this information in available in one secure location.

Your police department has a tremendous amount of documentation to keep up with. In a paper-environment, document retention takes up an enormous amount of space - even if you're using a network drive to store your documents electronically, there are so many revisions to store that it's easy for that drive to get ugly and unmanageable, fast! When you're retaining documents for 25 years to a lifetime, this quickly adds up. Now, tracking the history of all of these documents is a big task to wrap your arms around but is a requirement for your police department.

Problem: Megan is looking through files on her departments' network to try to find the most recent revision of her departments' Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). There are several versions of the SOPs, and she needs to make sure that she pulls the most recent version for review. If it's this hard for her to locate, imagine how it must be for every other employee of the police department who needs to have quick access to this information.

Solution: Using Qualtrax the SOPs are searchable and easy to navigate to through the browse tree. Megan can also see all of the past revisions of the document in the event that she needs to go back through and see when the document was last updated, who it was updated by, and what changes were made. This is true of every document in the system.

You handle a lot of very sensitive information that police department visitors don't need to see, but that you definitely need to have record of in your system. While your LIMS system handles most of this information, some of it may need to be controlled in Qualtrax for various reasons. Every single document you put in Qualtrax can be given specific view and edit permissions. This allows your police department complete control over who can see and edit your documentation. This also eliminates the need to have confidential information sitting on a shared drive or in a binder/filing cabinet.

Problem: Nathan is a quality manager in your police department and wants to make sure that certain documents are only viewable by a specific group of employees in the police department. In a paper system this means that a handful of employees are given security privileges to certain paper documents, and in an electronic environment these employees need to have access to certain folders on the network. Now, the trick is making sure that these sensitive documents only appear in these limited locations. In addition, as employees come and go at the police department, Nathan has to keep these permissions current.

Solution: Using Qualtrax, Nathan can set up groups in the system and give them specific permissions to view and edit specific documents. This guarantees that only employees with certain security permissions can access sensitive documents. As users are added or deleted from the system and put into groups in Qualtrax, these permissions will automatically be granted to the appropriate employees. Nathan can rest easy knowing that sensitive documents have the security they need. Using Qualtrax permission settings is also a great way to ensure that all employees see documents that pertain to their job function, and this helps you limit what "view-only" guests (such as auditors) are able to access when they visit your police department.

Every business (police departments included) has several processes that require paper passing. Equipment calibration, purchasing requests, paid time off requests, customer complaints, and others are all processes that can get lost on someone's desk or email inbox. It's a waste of everyone's time to try to track down the next person in line to ensure a process is pushed through to completion, and it can be very time intensive to determine status of a process. Processes are a reality for every business, and handling them isn't always easy.

Problem: Mark is trying to put in a vacation request for his summer trip. He's filled out the paper form with plenty of time to spare and given it to his manager. Mark's manager has taken the vacation request and signed off that it's been approved. This request now needs to be sent to the HR manager, but the vacation request gets lost on Mark's manager's desk once things in the police department pick up and more strain is put on the manager's time. The vacation request finally turns up, but only after Mark checked in with his manager to make sure everything was in order for him to leave town the next week.

Solution: Mark logs in to Qualtrax and submits his vacation request using a Qualtrax workflow. This request will route directly to Mark's manager where he'll get an electronic notification that approval is needed. Once Mark's manager has approved, the vacation request will be sent to the HR manager who will give final approval. At that time, Mark will get an electronic notification saying that his vacation has been approved and he's good to go! In some cases, customers will have approvals put a notification on a company-wide calendar, and alert Mark's close employees that he'll be out. While this process is going on, Mark can login to Qualtrax at any time and see where his request is in the approval process - this gives everyone visibility of what is going on and peace of mind that things are going as they should.

Trainings and certifications (and re-certifications, for that matter) are one of those things that somehow takes up more time than we'd all like them to. In a paper-system, pulling files is a long, hard way to make sure your whole police department is up to date on trainings, and it's easy to overlook re-certification and training deadlines. Qualtrax will help you keep everything in line by notifying managers when trainings have expired, and when re-certifications are in order. All trainings can easily be reported on so that you can see where gaps in training requirements may exist.

Problem: Josh knows that he has met his standard training requirements, but isn't sure when one of his re-certification trainings is due. He goes to the HR manager to ask them to pull his training records so he can plan his training accordingly. The HR manager gets to it as soon as he can. Finally, HR pulls his record only to find that he has two incomplete trainings that should have been completed the month prior.

Solution: Using the Qualtrax training matrix, Josh logs in to Qualtrax and pulls up his training history. He can see all of the trainings that are available to him and whether or not they are required or optional. From here Josh can also see which trainings have been completed and which trainings still need to be satisfied. Using document management, Josh can also see when his certifications expire. The HR manager can also use the training management piece of Qualtrax to quickly run a report to see who has completed police department trainings and where employees still need some training.