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Bucking the Trend: Solid Biosciences adopts its subsidiary’s eQMS, not vice versa
About Solid Biosciences Inc.
Based in Charlestown, MA, Solid Biosciences Inc. (Solid) is a life sciences company focused on advancing a portfolio of gene therapy candidates and neuromuscular and cardiac programs. Their mandate is to improve the daily lives of patients living with these devastating diseases.
In 2022, Solid Biosciences Inc. acquired AavantiBio, a gene therapy biopharma company.
Success Highlights
It Pays to Keep an Open Mind
When Senior Director of Clinical Quality, Sarah Picard, joined Solid, she understood that one of her responsibilities would be to clean up their incumbent electronic quality management system (eQMS) and investigate an expansion. It’s one the very visible, “versatile” systems that everyone’s heard of. But here’s the issue…things can go south if you don’t maintain it.
Sarah quickly determined that the existing eQMS was, in her words, “a mess”. Thousands of documents were still in the draft state, many were owned by employees no longer with the company, and the system wasn’t being optimized properly.
As it happened, this was right around the time Solid acquired AavantiBio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company and existing customer of ZenQMS. Before embarking on the huge task to overhaul Solid’s disorganized eQMS, Sarah and her team decided to take a closer look at the value AavantiBio was getting from ZenQMS.
Talk about continuous improvement! Instead of following the status quo – where the acquired company automatically adopts whatever tools and software the parent company is using – Solid brought common sense to the table!
“It didn’t make sense to invest a lot of money into fixing [the current eQMS] as it wasn’t what we needed at the time,” said Sarah. “It was going to be really expensive and we’d only have the Documents module. We wouldn’t have all the other stuff that comes with ZenQMS.”
It’s a testament to Sarah and her team’s open-mindedness that they pivoted away from the business-as-usual approach to bring in a better-fitting eQMS for Solid that would ultimately deliver more benefits for less money.
An Immediate Impact
Solid’s substantial cost savings were one of the biggest reasons for leaving behind their incumbent eQMS. Another was that ZenQMS was already implemented, running smoothly, and familiar to AavantiBio’s employees, which made the transition that much easier.
“ZenQMS is the fastest system to put into place. [To us] that is its greatest benefit.”
One ZenQMS fan was Jackie Amador, an independent consultant at Amador Clinical Research Consulting, who was in charge of the initial implementation and has been working with Solid to make their transition to ZenQMS as seamless as possible.
“The biggest advantage is the time-frame from launch,” said Jackie. “A competitor I’ve worked with takes a lot longer to get everything built the way you want it before you can actually start the implementation. ZenQMS is the fastest system to put into place. [To us] that is its greatest benefit.”
Faith Barnard, former Senior Director of Quality Assurance, was around when ZenQMS was first implemented at AavantiBio and appreciates an eQMS that’s easily configurable.
“Making software fit-for-purpose for your own organization is really important, especially in Quality systems,” said Faith. “I worked with one where you couldn’t make any changes at all without hiring a consultant, and you had to wait a year for that consultant. You ended up building your system around the software instead of building the software around your system.”
Being trapped on software that’s not fit-for-purpose is a common problem for quality teams that doesn’t get enough attention. Sure, there are plenty of large, traditional systems out there that offer lots of features…if you can ever find a reason to use them. Case in point: the system in place before Sarah arrived at Solid was too big for what they needed. ZenQMS meets them where they’re at now and can easily scale with them as they grow.
“The biggest ROI of ZenQMS is being compliant from the get-go,” said Faith. “I’ve been at companies where they’ve implemented a document control system, which is a huge project to get up and running, but still did deviations and training on paper. It makes a lot more sense to implement something like ZenQMS, where all of the modules are available and included, and you can roll them out as you need to.”
Whether you’re struggling with a complicated eQMS that’s not fit-for-purpose, or looking to move away from manual and homegrown QMS tools, ZenQMS can help. Schedule a demo and discover why we’re the less stress eQMS.