BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company with over 98,000 employees worldwide. Headquartered in London, United Kingdom, it is the largest telecommunications services company in the world.

BT required an electronic system to help manage their audit and document management processes, providing a standardised approach across all lines of the businesses it supports.

Q-Pulse, developed by Gael Ltd, was chosen to help them effectively achieve this.

The Challenge

By working with both the Audit Planning Programme and Audit Tracking systems, BT Group had been using two separate databases to manage them. However, these databases were old, beginning to encounter problems and both were not linked together in the way that BT required.

BT Group recognised that what they needed was an easily accessible application that managed all parts of their auditing processes from beginning to end, in one central location. It also had to be usable to the auditing community.

Chris Beynon, Operate Lead Quality Partner, said: “Prior to finding Q-Pulse we were facing a number of problems with our management system in that our previous tracking system was out of support and starting to go faulty. It was therefore unable to provide us with the audit statistics that we needed.

“We needed a system that allowed us to meet and solve these problems head on, improving our processes at the same time.”

The Solution

After being introduced to Q-Pulse, BT were blown away by the solution’s capabilities including its configuration options allowing them to tailor the product to their needs.

Chris added: “We were initially attracted to Q-Pulse because of the flexibility of the system and the fact that the Q-Pulse tool provided us with an ability to modify the solution to support new ways of working.

“Q-Pulse was an “out-of-the-box” solution which provided us with excellent tools for the planning and tracking of audits and also included some strong in-built features to manage, for instance, email reminders, escalation and reporting. It was the simple application that we were looking for, and we had looked at a lot of other different products matching our list of requirements. Q-Pulse allowed us to mainly manage our audit findings, schedule audits and also control our document register.

“We planned on using a number of modules for our processes including Audit, CA/PA and the Document module. The Audit and CA/PA modules would provide us with a standardised approach to our audit findings across the line of business supported by the BT Quality team. Through using the Document module, it would allow us to monitor and track key documents that needed to be reviewed by third party suppliers on an annual basis.

“A significant advantage that Q-Pulse had over competing products was that it was competitively priced and had excellent configurability. We felt this was important as it would make the transition from the existing systems to the new system as painless as possible for our auditing teams.”

The Result

BT Group’s implementation of Q-Pulse was such a success that they expanded the solution across other lines of business within the company, a move which has centralised all of their processes, reports and identifying areas of improvements needed.

Chris said: “Q-Pulse has been extremely beneficial for us since implementing the software. It has allowed us to introduce a standardised approach across all lines of the business we support, but at the same time providing the flexibility needed to change when our processes do. It also allows us to easily provide the statistics such as numbers of audits and coverage of geographic locations required by our senior management team.

“Q-Pulse’s powerful workload management features – including automatic email reminders, escalation and reporting – was excellent in helping us keep on top of both our auditing and documentation processes. It also allowed us to easily integrate Management Information Statistics related information into MS Excel and other tools which was a huge benefit.

“The automatic email, reminder and escalation features within Q-Pulse significantly reduced the amount of time we previously spent tracking and closing corrective actions. Q-Pulse has helped reduce costs at the same time by reducing the workload associated with planning, tracking and the closing of audits.

“We also found extremely beneficial the ability to have one instance of Q-Pulse with multiple databases, allowing for legal reasons to separate one line of business from the others. It means different lines of the business could use the same technology but have it tailored to their specific business needs.

“We have since expanded the use of Q-Pulse across various other lines of business within BT, standardising the way we plan, manage and track audits and our corrective actions. This in turn has led to a more centralised system for both our auditing and documentation processes.

“But one of the major benefits that we have noticed from using Q-Pulse is the ability to create reports that call on fields across all modules of Q-Pulse, so that when we create audit report we can include fields from – at a minimum – both the Audit and CA/PA modules.

“All in all Q-Pulse has been a revelation since we implemented the software, it is a one-stop shop for all of our audit scheduling, tracking and finding management and it is a system that I would recommend to other organisations.”