Houston-based oil-rig consulting firm The Athens Group first started using a quality-management system from Traction Software Inc. of Providence six years ago for an upcoming push for ISO 9001 certification.
The international company soon discovered that documenting its quality controls was only one of the ways it could use the software, which Traction has been developing for nearly 20 years.
Now after many jobs and a successful ISO certification, the software, called TeamPage, powers Athens’ company intranet.
“The reason we chose it is because it is Web based with a good security audit and trail feature,” said Thomas Cogdell, DTA quality manager for Athens Group. “Every change to every document is tracked and reported on, and nothing gets lost. It gives us the flexibility to encourage employees to add to the knowledge base freely and the quality control we need.”
Athens’ embrace of TeamPage to create a corporate intranet is an example of a larger wave of companies expanding Web-based quality-management software into a broad array of applications touching on the way employees work and interact.
Traction Vice President of Sales Jordan Frank said in the last few years, customers have taken the TeamPage package and run with it into new functions the company hadn’t originally imagined.
The driver, he said, is the dynamics that function in social media, in which a flexible system builds on itself and adapts to users’ needs.
“What’s been happening is we had a solution that has been leading the social-collaboration market, which was founded with blogs and wikis and Twitter-style project-management posting,” Frank said. “People have found all these ways of structuring knowledge management and put them into an enterprise 2.0 social collaboration effort.”
TeamPage operates like an internal social media platform and online news site for a company, allowing employees to communicate in the most efficient way possible.
Frank said the potential in manufacturing appears particularly powerful for small and medium-sized companies without the resources to create sophisticated internal systems in house.
As with any quality-management system, TeamPage has tools to work through nonconformance issues and corrective action. When something goes wrong, almost as important as fixing it is documenting exactly what went wrong and why it went wrong.
A finely tuned authorization system makes sure only the information cleared for certain levels is seen and only those cleared to make changes can.
Across an organization, tasks can be assigned, updated, completed and tracked.
On the human resources side, managers can create, edit and update corporate policy and training, then track who has read it and signed off.
Before this kind of system was available, companies would rely on word-processing programs and spreadsheets to document and create, share, edit and track best standard-operating procedures and the like.
In addition to being cumbersome and nowhere near as interactive as the Web-based platforms, conventional documents can’t be traced with the same edit history.
Traction redesigned its website in June and Frank said now that customers have begun to realize what they can use the software for, interest has multiplied in the last few months.
The next step for Traction, Frank said, is to pivot marketing the software for these new uses and build forms giving companies without the instincts or resources to customize the platform the ability to use it in some of the ways customers like Athens Group are.
Traction, with eight full-time employees, will have to deal with the attention of software behemoths who have realized the potential market.
“The giants have moved in,” Frank said. “You need to market around that by making it clear how this meets different business processes.” •
