Bettal
Bettal had concerns about the vast volume of documentation they were generating in support of its customers’ systems, and needed a solution to help them better manage this.
Background
Bettal Quality Consultancy Ltd has been in operation since 1994. During this time they have become the market leaders in the supply of Quality Management Systems and training to the Social Care Sector.
Based in Brampton, Cumbria, Bettal’s products and services are now widely used across the UK. Their flagship product, ‘Cared 4 Quality Management System’ is used in more than 1,400 locations. These include care homes for the elderly, domiciliary care facilities and for residential and support services dedicated to those with learning disabilities and mental health problems.
Bettal products and services depend on knowledge of Best Practice, National Standards of Care and International Standards of Quality Assurance. The company’s personnel have wide experience and qualifications in the Social Care field and in the world of Quality Assurance.
The requirements
A major concern for Albert Cook, Managing Director at Bettal, was that the company was generating a vast volume of documentation in support of its customers’ systems. An increasing range of regulatory pressures, combined with a desire to provide customers with a more individually tailored service, contributed to an ever-increasing library.
Managing this library of information to ensure that customers always had a document set that was accurate, up-to-date and matched their individual business needs was creating a significant business overhead and a potential constraint on company growth.
At the same time, a number of Bettal’s customers had expressed an interest in having real-time, online access to their documentation. Albert was keen to provide his customers with a solution and find a way of reducing his administrative overhead.
Sarah Peers, Business Development Manager at Bettal, was asked to look into a solution. The solution had to simplify the management of Bettal’s enormous library of documentation with multiple variations tailored for its customers. At the same time it would need to deliver the right documents to the Bettal customer base.
Sarah’s options were to pay an IT developer to build a bespoke system or look for an existing IT solution. The former option was soon dismissed as being too costly to design, develop and maintain, plus, the complexity of the requirement would also extend the development timescale of a suitable solution.
Sarah put together a list of key features that a technological solution would need. Ideally, a system would need to:
- Provide controlled, secure access to documents with views tailorable by individual user or groups of users
- The ability to store Bettal’s existing electronic documents (predominantly Microsoft Word documents but including spreadsheets, graphics and several other formats) without the need for reformatting or conversion
- Support electronic processes to manage the notification of new material to users, the online acknowledgement of this content, the regular review and update of documents and the approval of changes
- Provide the potential for Bettal’s customers to take ownership of the system to add their own documents to subscription content
- Automatically generate all the necessary evidence of review and update to demonstrate compliance with the latest Care Standards
- The system would need to be easy to use and had to simplify the administration of customer systems to alleviate the expanding administrative effort
The EQMS solution
Sarah decided upon EQMS from Qualsys, a solution that ticked all the boxes and more.
After an initial demonstration and discussion between Sarah and Robert Oakley, Commercial Director at Qualsys, the two companies began to formulate a partnership agreement. Strategy was built around offering Bettal customers the option to buy a subscription to access their Bettal manuals and documents online, with the further option of an additional subscription to build and manage their own online document library incorporating template Bettal documents.
The role EQMS now plays
From Bettal’s perspective the use of EQMS massively reduces the effort and cost associated with managing multiple, complex sets of documents. And from Qualsys’ perspective the Bettal systems offers the company extensive access to the growing care home industry and the prospect of supplying multiple systems through a single partner with a strong reputation in the sector.
Most importantly, the partnership provides Bettal customers with access to critical documentation. They can always access the latest version of documentation and are assured that the content is compliant with all the latest legislation and standards.
Qualsys worked extensively with Bettal to ensure their EQMS systems were configured to minimise the effort of updating multiple systems. Qualsys created links between the Bettal EQMS systems, allowing Bettal to upload a single instance of a document and have it automatically replicated across multiple customer systems.
“Our knowledge and expertise in the sector combined with the technical know-how of the Qualsys team and the ease of use of the EQMS solution has provided our customers with an innovative and valuable service.” said Albert.
He continued: “We will be rolling out systems for many more of our customers and we fully expect the provision of this service to extend market penetration to many new customers in the coming months.”
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