RapidValue facilitates quality standards compliance within BPM

Versioning is one of the most valuable new features in the next release of STAEDEAN RapidValue. By adding a version number to any of the content items that serve as the building blocks for processes, roles, activities, and employee guidance, and incrementing it whenever changes are made, it becomes possible to demonstrate beyond a doubt that a company’s practices meet quality standards now and whether they did in the past. In maintaining ISO and other certifications, companies can rely on the versioning capability to simplify their efforts, gain greater transparency, and save the expense of deploying a quality management system.

Extending a BPM solution with an important quality compliance feature

When companies need to demonstrate that they follow certain regulatory mandates or quality standards, they often use quality management systems (QMS), or a combination of quality and content management systems (CMS) to record and track standards documentation, process descriptions, employee guidance, communications, and other content. In this effort, it is extremely important to eliminate any ambiguity regarding which standard or practice applied where and when, and what employees would have seen if they needed to access standards-related content. The ability to prove that a company’s practices are and were standards-compliant now and in the past is critical in decisions relating to a company’s ISO and industry certifications. Even the outcome of labor disputes and legal actions can depend on whether an accident resulted from carelessness on the part of an individual, or if it happened because a company’s standards compliance was faulty.

Many organizations already use STAEDEAN RapidValue, the business process management (BPM) solution for Microsoft Dynamics AX, not just for business process management and business process modeling, but also to ensure that their roles and processes fall within regulatory or other standards. The versioning feature in the 6.3.1502 release of RapidValue provides the tracking that lets them demonstrate beyond a doubt what their processes, roles, documentation, employee guidance, and other supporting content were at any time in the past, even when repeated changes have taken place since then. As they use this RapidValue feature, companies can reduce costs and IT complexity by making their QMS redundant. If they already invest the effort in maintaining and revising process, role, and other content in RapidValue, they no longer need to duplicate these steps in a QMS to satisfy quality standards.

What versioning in RapidValue looks like
With the newest release of RapidValue, each content record has a version number. When you make changes and republish it, you can decide whether the next iteration is a major or minor version, and add notes to explain the updates. You also can advance the version number on multiple selected records.

Version information appears in all published content. In the previews of RapidValue solutions, flows, and activities, the version detail appears in the footer. You can easily track the version increments in the change history for any given record. When you publish documents, help, and websites, you have the option to include version information.

We kept RapidValue versioning simple. Customers and partners who requested and reviewed the new versioning feature did not look for such capabilities as check-in and check-out, or reverting to previous versions. What they wanted was an uncomplicated tool that would help them track and demonstrate standards compliance from within their BPM resource. RapidValue versioning makes that possible with minimal effort and expense.

The 6.3.1502 release of RapidValue is planned for September 2015. If you have questions or comments regarding versioning or any other RapidValue features, please let me hear from you.