Qualtrax in Action at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation
By on December 5, 2014
This week, I had the pleasure of hearing Clint Thomason, System Quality Manager of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), speak about how his 5-lab organization uses Qualtrax. Clint spoke at a webinar attended by Qualtrax forensics users and future users. As someone still fairly new Qualtrax, I learned much more about how we help make compliance easier for forensic labs.
Clint gave us an inside look at how he organizes documents, workflows, training, and reports. Although Qualtrax translates into many regulated industries, seeing best practices of how a forensic lab organizes their system was compelling. Here are some of the highlights:
CBI organizes controlled documents viewable by all employees by discipline. This allows for clear, easy use.
Document edits and approvals in the logged in view is super simple, versus their previous system of carrying paper files to each approver, having multiple revisions and risk of misplacing most recent versions.
We were able to see an example of CBI’s purchase request workflow in Qualtrax. A question was asked about what happens when an employee changes positions or leaves in the middle of a workflow. Clint expressed excitement around a feature in Qualtrax to reassign responsibilities across the system.
The reporting functionality of Qualtrax is a huge time saver for CBI. He shared that many common workflows are freely available on Qualtrax’s Support Portal, but that he has also created many custom workflows relevant to CBI.
I particularly loved the report example Clint shared on his master document list. This was previously an Excel spreadsheet which had to be updated manually each time a document was updated. In Qualtrax, this is automatically updated, meaning he does not have to spend any time to manage it manually.
The training section of Qualtrax is very user friendly. Clint manages his time wisely by training other managers how to create and administrate tests in the system.
Are you as excited as I am? If you want to hear the full case study, click here. In the questions section, let us know you would like to see the full webinar.
Here’s a little more about Clint:
Clint was a latent print examiner for the Pueblo Colorado Police Department for five years until he joined the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in 2007 as a latent print examiner. Clint became the lab Director for the CBI Grand Junction Forensic Laboratory in 2011. In early 2012 Clint took over as CBI System Quality Manager. He has been in that role ever since. Clint is the LIMS administrator as well as the Qualtrax administrator.
Category: Uncategorized
