"We often work with clients from around the world and collaborating on document creation is the norm.  DocBanq allows us to share documents among our clients and consultants, provides full revision control of those documents, and we have single place to store them instead of having them reside on an individual consultants desktop.  Plus, we now we have a capability our competitors don't offer!"
Chris Schorre, Director of Business Development
 

Summary

With offices in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia, Emergo Group is an ISO-registered consulting firm, a leader in regulatory affairs and quality systems implementation for medical device companies.

Emergo Group Inc. serves more than 250 clients in 25 countries to ensure that they are consistently in compliance by offering regulatory and quality assurance services to a wide range of device manufacturers.

Emergo Group's Head office is located in Austin, Texas.

Like many global organisations today, the ability to efficiently and securely collaborate on the right documents can be almost impossible to achieve.  And when you add the requirement to extend your management systems to also your clients, then the complexity of the implementation and cost skyrocket.

Emergo decided to implement a DocBanq solution with spectacular results for their clients and themselves.

The Challenge

A key requirement of operating in regulated industry sectors is the controlled management of documentation and other electronic records such as e-mail.  In order to implement best-practice document and records management, organisations tend to implement systems within their premises.  However, conventional in-house systems were in conflict with Emergo's set of requirements which were as follows:

• To establish an international collaborative document control capability to improve internal operational efficiency and to aid Emergo Group's compliance with the ISO standard.
• To demonstrate market-leading consulting capabilities to clients by adopting tools to improve document-based compliance outcomes.
• To enable Emergo Group to build ongoing and deeper relationships with clients by allowing comprehensive and continuous controlled access to documentation sets that are created and/or managed by Emergo Group on behalf of their clients.
• To have a solution that integrates seamlessly with Intra- and Extranets that is powerful but easy to install and use.
• To create a single repository of client data that takes the form of everything from physical product samples to PDF documents to complex CAD drawings

"We often work with clients from around the world and collaborating on document creation is the norm.  DocBanq allows us to share documents among our clients and consultants, provides full revision control of those documents, and we have single place to store them instead of having them reside on an individual consultant's desktop.  Plus, we now we have a capability our competitors don't offer," said Chris Schorre, Director of Business Development.

With multiple offices around the world and the need to collaborate online with clients directly from their web site, a new type of solution was required.

The Solution

Emergo implemented DocBanq as the system of choice for their document and records management program.

With a user base distributed around the globe, ease of access and deployment of the solution to each user was crucial.  For this reason, Emergo integrated DocBanq with their web site.  The seamless web integration of DocBanq allows Emergo to direct to their web site any client who requires access to documents.  Emergo staff controls access and security so that only authorised users can access the system.

The Results

With the system now fully operational, Emergo has established a collaborative document management capability not only for their own staff but also for their clients as well.  "One of the big advantage of the DocBanq system is that clients can simply drag & drop documents without the need to go through a complicated process every time they want to submit or retrieve documents.  Once clients are on the system, we rarely hear from them as the system is very easy to use," added Chris Schorre.

For their clients, instant and secure access to key documents from anywhere simply eliminate common problems that plague so many organisations such as working with the wrong versions of documents, non secure email transfer of sensitive information and not being able to easily find the right documentation.  During the critical stages of a regulatory submission, these sorts of hurdles should never be tolerated.

Furthermore, DocBanq provides Emergo with the capability of performing their own document collection backups.  Although DocBanq is delivered as a complete hosted and maintained solution, including backups, customers can also easily perform backups at a location of their choice if they wish.  "Although we know the system is professionally backed up and maintained, we like to be able to perform our own backups as well when we see fit.  The features provided in DocBanq allow us to do this easily," said Chris Schorre.

DocBanq added to Emergo's service offering a powerful and easy to use system with none of the difficulties so commonly associated with installing, maintaining, upgrading and supporting conventional solutions.

Web:  www.emergogroup.com