ComplianceQuest fast-tracks an organization's efficiency, safety and overall performance by combining modern cloud EQMS with the latest technology in collaboration, communication, and social media across the product value chain.

Implementing Quality Management Software can help an organization to demonstrate that they meet both customer requirements and constantly changing regulations. These systems are in place to ensure product or services meet the expected quality standards of the customer. This also helps an organization to demonstrate regulatory requirements are being met and organization can be trusted to be compliant.

ComplianceQuest is a 100% modern cloudEnterprise Quality Management Software (EQMS). Built using Salesforce.com, it is a tool for accelerating your organization’s growth from anywhere, anytime and through any device. It empowers small to large enterprises to manage quality by collaborating with their supply chains – whether global or local – and with their own sites, to stay compliant with industry, country and customer specific regulations. While the company provides support across industries, it specializes in Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Consumer and Electronic Goods, General Manufacturing, Hi-Tech and Life Sciences.

In colloquy with Prashanth Rajendran, CEO

Why did you establish the company? How did you select the vertical and decide to be a part of the global platform?

I am a manufacturing and industrial engineer by education and was already in the realm of process automation to improve the lives of people in the manufacturing space. My hands-on work with manufacturing companies and being responsible for engineering, manufacturing, business process and quality processes, gave me first-hand experience of what a company goes through to achieve certification. Most importantly, over the last 30 years, I learnt what it takes to create a culture of continuous improvement.

I realize that with all the changes in the market, regulations in place, globalization etc, customers are looking to address five key challenges in quality and compliance in the manufacturing and life sciences space:

• Growing complex supply chain
• Need for Quality “Built-in”
• Global regulatory changes
• Risk uncertainty
• Reduce time to market and development costs

To address the above, ComplianceQuest developed an Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) built on a modern cloud architecture that addresses present-day and emerging quality and compliance business challenges. The result is a variety of capabilities that streamline, standardize and centralize product lifecycle and quality process data and content from across the value chain. ComplianceQuest made the decision to use Salesforce Cloud to leverage everything the Salesforce Business platform provides today and, in the future, as well as tapping into the Salesforce ecosystem, with Salesforce third-party AppExhange solutions.

Salesforce itself is also becoming a more standard platform within many companies and hence IT is looking at other Salesforce apps available to extend the value of their investment and reduce overall IT footprint. This modern cloud experience means a reduction in management of modular licenses and versions and simplifies IT issues surrounding software management. Using the cloud, customers will always have the most updated version of the software platform. In addition, since the business application platform is continued to be innovated and managed by Salesforce, this allows ComplianceQuest to drive more innovation into its own solutions. Because of the ease of development, ComplianceQuest can quickly create fully working prototypes, new features or customer specific capabilities to address new market or customer requirements and turn them into final production solutions.

What are the challenges you encountered in the initial years and how did you outdo?

The initial challenge faced was the adoption of Modern Cloud technology especially those built on a cloud business platform like Salesforce. However, the Salesforce approach for a 100% modern cloud infrastructure and all its business platform benefits made it easy for ComplianceQuest to focus solely on its own solution innovation to create a platform with the breadth and depth of functionality manufacturing companies need today.

In addition, on-premise solutions were making it more and more difficult to meet the increasing requirements of businesses. These legacy solutions do not have good monitoring around what is happening on the systems so getting and understanding what the performance is or how much availability the applications have is nearly impossible.

Since its inception, ComplianceQuest has already tripled in size (by end of 2017) with clients from all over the world. ComplianceQuest’s impressive list of customers includes small, medium to large life sciences as well as a diversified list of manufacturing clients from aerospace & defense, automotive, consumer goods, and hi-tech companies.

ComplianceQuest provides a unified suite of applications on a single platform addressing quality management, manufacturing quality, supplier management, customer/field service quality and health & safety. ComplianceQuest supports 10 core best practices driven solutions (Audit, CAPA, Change, Complaints, Document Management, Equipment, Inspections, Non-conformance, Supplier Management, Training and Dashboards & Reports) that are out-of-the-box, easy to integrate, validate and ready to go.

What kind of mixed responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

ComplianceQuest hit the ground running as it began marketing and selling its solution into the manufacturing and life sciences industry. The initial challenge faced was the adoption of Modern Cloud technology especially those built on a cloud business platform like Salesforce. Building ComplianceQuest solutions on modern cloud platform, like Salesforce, supports the architecture for simplicity in implementation, scalability and reliability in management, and rapidity in developing and integrating enterprise-scale applications. Utilizing the Salesforce ecosystem, ComplianceQuest is able to leverage popular tools such as Chatter, Like/Follow and Community Portals to drive social collaboration while reducing product quality variations. Leveraging the Salesforce platform makes the ComplianceQuest solution secure, as it is compliant with FISMA SSAE 16, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS Level 1 certifications and other common data security protection laws. Automatic back-ups and real-time updates to secondary disaster recovery instances provide the enterprise grade protection to data and up-time availability of the mission critical systems. The Salesforce approach for a 100% modern cloud infrastructure and all its business platform benefits made it easy for ComplianceQuest to focus solely on our own solution innovation to create a platform with the breadth and depth of functionality manufacturing companies need today.

In addition, recent years has seen rapid advancement in connectivity, mobility, analytics, scalability and big data – what we call the fourth Industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. This digital transformation in manufacturing has put an increased focus for manufacturing and quality leaders on solutions like quality management at an enterprise-level to improve both revenue and bottom line efficiency. For companies like ComplianceQuest that made the initial decision to adopt modern cloud platform allows us to take advantage of the latest and future technology advancement such as Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Smart Connectivity and Collaboration throughout the entire product value chain.

As a growing company in a modern cloud world, gaining visibility and creating customer value is necessary to aid in the company growth. By leveraging the Salesforce ecosystem, ComplianceQuest has built relationships with other critical application vendors, such as ERP, and channel partners to create a global network delivering comprehensive capabilities and a differentiated value in the market.

What are your success factors?

Much of ComplianceQuest success hinges on the company’s “customers first mission and values,” a top priority across the company. ComplianceQuest’s team of domain experts is committed to innovation, product excellence and to the success of our customers. Our vision is to combine unparalleled experience across multiple industries with comprehensive capabilities. I think my greatest assets are the talented staff that I am surrounded by. They are experienced and passionate. That is a tough combination to beat. If I had to pick the top 5, it would be:

1. Our customer success group that goes above and beyond any expectation to delight our customers
2. The knowledge and hard work of my team in sales, marketing, services and support and product development
3. Our experienced thought leaders know what the market is looking for, and the product design reflects just that
4. Our talented development team and the robust product they have created and continue to remain ahead of the curve
5. Our partnership with Salesforce is invaluable

How big is your organization today? Briefly explain the organizational structure?

Our team is not large, but it is strong! We have over 50 team members. About 80% of the team concentrates on customer success and product development. This is the basis of the organization. We like to stay engaged with the customers and make sure they are leveraging the product to their greatest advantage. The rest of the team makes up marketing, finance, sales and other support functions. We have a fairly flat organizational structure with experts that concentrate on making each function a center of excellence.

Where do you see your company couple of years from now?

ComplianceQuest’s journey is steadfast in its belief of Salesforce platform and ecosystem as a strong foundation for continuing to develop and deliver future innovative solutions and seeing rapid growth globally. ComplianceQuest has carved  itself  a  niche  by  charting  out  many success stories that testify its relentless focus in guaranteeing customers  the leadership to make real-data decisions, speed new product introductions and enable anywhere, anytime access to data. ComplianceQuest will continue our approach to develop solutions:

• Incorporate Best Practices from various industries
• Flexible to support ever changing customer business needs
• Enable visibility of key business indicators
• Highly intuitive to enable easy adoption by various levels of customer stakeholders
• Pre-Integrated between all our solutions, Salesforce and AppExchange applications especially those focused on manufacturing such as ERP
• Pre-validated (IQ/OQ) to reduce time of implementation

Greet the brilliance behind ComplianceQuest

Prashanth directly oversees ComplianceQuest’s sales, marketing, partnerships, finance, IT, legal and overall company strategy and direction. He comes to the company with more than twenty-five years’ experience in manufacturing, engineering and quality. Prior to ComplianceQuest, Prashanth was President and CEO of Lattice Social, a cutting-edge software company for incorporating social media into business-to-business collaboration. For more than twenty years he was the co-founder, Board member and COO of Pilgrim Software, a Quality Management System software company. He grew the organization from inception to goal of successfully selling the company. Prior to this, he held a variety of positions in Manufacturing Engineering. Prashanth currently serves on several Boards fostering entrepreneurship in the Tampa Bay area. Prashanth holds an MS in Industrial Engineering from the University of South Florida and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in India.

"We are continually focusing on increasing productivity and reducing costs for our customers.”