Austin Water

The Austin Water Utility is a NELAC-accredited organization, but NELAC isn’t the only standard they’re held to –  Because they’re responsible for regulatory drinking water and wastewater, they’re also held to 40 CFR Parts 136 and 141 and the EPA Certification Manual for drinking water.

With so many different standards, Austin Water needed a flexible solution where they could centralize their compliance efforts.

“We chose Qualtrax because it solved so many of our pain points and issues that we have in the lab.”

 

– Eric Davis, Quality Assurance Officer at Austin Water

With Qualtrax, Eric says they were able to consolidate all of their compliance data into a centralized system rather than working with multiple separate software solutions. This greatly improves their ability to demonstrate compliance to auditors. Because their documents are associated to the standards within the system, they can easily provide the most relevant data to an auditor’s specific inquiries.

Eric already has some plans for ways that they’re not yet using Qualtrax, including gap analysis to help them understand where their compliance practices may need some improvement, and transitioning previously in-person trainings into web-based trainings in Qualtrax, which will result in a great deal of time savings across the organization.

In addition, Austin Water is using Qualtrax for processes outside the scope of compliance and accreditation. When implementing a new LIMS, they decided to create a checklist to track all of the actions needed to complete the implementation. When management was concerned about the progress being made on the implementation project, Eric was able to pull reports of the completed milestones to demonstrate their progress.

Eric says that the flexibility of the Qualtrax solution in enabling users to create their own workflows and organize their documents in the way that they want is matched by the flexibility of the company as a whole.

“Qualtrax really listens to what the customers are wanting and then they prioritize it.”

Categories: Environmental, Testing Labs