Special thanks to Tabitha (Kemp) Terebieniec, Quality Program Director, for taking some time out of her busy schedule to talk with us.
Connect with Tabitha on LinkedIn
Video Discussion Transcription:
I work at USPack as the Quality Program Director. That puts me in charge of our ISO 9001:2015 compliance, or quality management system. We write standard operating procedures for our USPack Med division to meet certain requirements of that standard. Those requirements are called clauses – vendor qualifications, quality management meetings, training, orientation – things like that, that have to be documented and show evidence. That gives us control from a quality standpoint – we know that everyone has access to the same thing across the board.
I don’t just come up with the procedure and then tell everybody to do it. I have to make sure that those procedures are controlled, those procedures have been verified through a review/approval process, and that only one copy, the living copy of that procedure, is out and available for all personnel.
What I like about ISO 9001:2015 is that the majority of our customers are already following this standard. So it’s apples to apples, and they understand that you have your ducks in a row, basically.
We use a really nice program called Rise – it comes from the Articulate [software] family. We take our information that we need employees [and contractors] to learn and we can compile it in whatever order we want. For example, I have a customer that moves something and they’ve put a beautiful video together on how exactly they want to do their process. I can embed that video into our training directly from the customer and have [employees and contractors] watch that video. I can take information from that video and put into a quiz where it’s “yes or no” and then they drag and drop boxes. It’s interactive and you have to be engaged in our training.
I think it promotes grasping the concepts when you’re interactive, so you’ll be able to remember, “oh, yeah, I did that in the quiz.” Or, “oh, yeah, that was one of the flash cards I went through.” Then [employees and contractors] can go back if they’ve forgotten maybe a small portion or they want to refresh, “hey, I haven’t done this load for a while, I know I learned about it. Let me go back into my system in my library and I can see all that information again.” They’ve got beautiful QR codes that we can just have driver scan the QR code that goes right to their phone. That way everybody gets the information at the same time instead of me talking to ‘Sue’ today, and then the same thing happens with ‘Bill’ tomorrow or two weeks down the road, and then I have to address it with someone else. The system really lets us take information that we need to expeditiously get to our folks and put it all together and send it out.
From there we have complete digital record. No more paper, no more signing in, saying “yes, I took this course and I understand it.” Because by completing the course, it proves to me that you understand what you’re doing. It’s so fast now compared to the headaches I’ve dealt with in the past and getting information from orientation or training. It’s just a super cool tool that we use to make sure that we get that information to everybody who needs it in a very swift matter of time.
