Vertex, part of United Utilities plc, is the UK's leading technology-based Business Operations Outsourcing Company, with a turnover of over £200 million and a workforce in excess of 3000. The company manages activities such as customer contact, billing and payments, field services and accounting for its clients in the utilities, public and private sectors.

With a diverse but demanding client profile, effective communication of the company's extensive procedural documentation and standards to everyone in the organisation via its Quality Management System (QMS) is essential. Vertex has its own Intranet and uses it to front internal communication. However, the structure of the QMS and the rapidity with which it was expanding made it difficult and time consuming to manage.

More worryingly, there were signs that it could become impossible. Each organisational area had quickly recognised the benefits of sharing information on the Intranet. This success had raised the prospect of many hundreds more pages of content being added to the structure of both the wider Intranet and the QMS itself.

Trevor Greenfield, Quality Manager for the Strategy and Development division of Vertex, was determined to structure the QMS to meet the challenge. He needed to ensure the delivery of the right documents to the right people at the right time. At the same time he had to respond rapidly to a changing environment which meant changes and modifications to the underlying structure of the QMS.

The Strategy and Development QMS contained multiple versions of the same document structure, with variations depending on the context. For example: opening the Software Development procedure for 'Project A' would deliver a variation on the standard Vertex Software Development procedure, with personalised paragraphs for the particular customer who was paying for the Project. Often these variations of standard procedures were shared with the customer and acted as guideline documents for that part of the customer-supplier relationship.

Staff working across a number of projects needed to be familiar with the structure of the QMS so they could quickly find the procedures they were looking for. They also wanted the QMS to be intelligent enough to 'know' the context in which they were using the system.

Microsoft FrontPage had been used to create and manage the Intranet initially - but with the prospect of hundreds of pages of content heading the way of the Intranet managers - they needed a database-driven management tool.

Trevor purchased EQMS from Qualsys as the tool to provide an electronic framework for the company's QMS.

Qualsys provided Vertex with the EQMS Document Manager software, the EQMS Database and a Navigator module matching exactly their own Intranet in-house style.

Qualsys technicians spent a number of days working alongside Trevor and his staff to establish the most effective way of structuring a QMS which comprised, initially, of over 200 individual documents and forms.

All Strategy and Development documentation was already stored in electronic format so it was a simple matter for a small team of 3 people to spend a day indexing the files.

Qualsys introduced a new level of hierarchy to their EQMS database to facilitate the in-context search. Vertex Users would select which Project they wanted to search before moving on to interrogate the QMS. 

Strategy and Development also decided to use the Microsoft SQL-Server database to provide scalability to support all 3000 of their own staff and potentially many customer-based users as well.

Vertex was able to distribute their QMS retaining their own corporate style.

Vertex now have a truly scaleable application with the capacity to support many more than their 3000 staff.

Improvements in the structure and changes to core procedures (and their variations) of the Vertex QMS can be replicated throughout the structure of every Vertex Project... instantly.

The Vertex Quality Management team can now concentrate on improving procedures, as their time is not fully taken up by managing the QMS structure.