Sarpsborg municipality integrates Certain QMS with SharePoint and archiving system

Sarpsborg municipality has close to 60,000 residents and well over 4,000 employees. In November 2021, the launch of the new quality management system got under way. Sarpsborg municipality chose Certain QMS, a complete quality management system.

Certain QMS consists of several modules and Sarpsborg municipality has chosen to use the system for the following tasks within quality and improvement work:

• Managing governing documents and processes
• Reporting and handling non-conformities
• Registering injury reports
• Carrying out risk analyses
• Planning and following up activities in the municipality’s annual planning cycle

We want to highlight our delivery to Sarpsborg municipality because this is a customer that has shown great commitment and understanding of the process of implementing a new quality management system in the organisation. They have been clear about their needs and have made effective use of our expertise in both quality management and management systems, as well as in technical solutions and digital work processes.

Sarpsborg municipality has focused on facilitating good user adoption in their quality work, and has therefore chosen to integrate Certain QMS with Microsoft SharePoint — which is already an established collaboration platform for the municipality’s employees. To maintain the statutory archiving obligation for documentation in the quality management system, a further integration has been chosen with Documaster’s standalone archive.

Certain is more than just a software supplier. Our delivery team consists of project advisers with higher education in quality and HSE. In our project deliveries, we work closely with the customer and provide advisory services in quality management, risk and HSE.

In addition to serving as professional advisers, we also bring sought-after technology expertise to our projects. Netpower, the IT company behind Certain QMS, develops and delivers several specialist systems, and we handle a wide variety of technical challenges for customers on a daily basis. We have extensive experience with system integrations and strong expertise in Microsoft 365 products. We have a large team of solution architects and developers who can be brought into projects where bespoke solutions are required.

In the project with Sarpsborg municipality, a significant part of the advisory work has consisted of best practice methods for working with non-conformities, risk and documents. The project has comprised several workshops covering both system configuration and working methodology. In addition to the main delivery, we have also delivered on the technical side a development project for the automated sending of injury reports from the non-conformity system, as well as integrations with third-party systems.

One of the values Sarpsborg municipality works by is to be forward-looking. This means creating space for development and improvement, being bold and daring to find new solutions. The municipality has demonstrated that it is an organisation capable of making effective use of multiple IT systems to create good work processes for its own quality and improvement work. By making use of integration capabilities, they have achieved solutions tailored to their organisation. It is precisely this holistic way of thinking that increases the likelihood of succeeding with quality and improvement work.

Quality and improvement work is to be carried out in all parts of the organisation, and the challenge is often to engage all levels of the organisation. Managers are familiar with the management systems and tools they need to use to do their jobs. QHSE managers use specialist systems for HSE and quality on a daily basis and are often super-users of the organisation’s QHSE tools. The challenge for most organisations is to engage the remaining employees — those who do not work directly with QHSE in their day-to-day work. Simply having to use an IT system that one does not normally work in can present a high barrier for many.

Certain QMS is a tool that is used in different ways and for different tasks, depending on one’s role in the organisation. It is an important specialist system for everyone with management and QHSE responsibilities, but it may not be equally well known to other employees.

To bring quality and improvement work to the fore in the organisation, Sarpsborg municipality has chosen to integrate selected parts of Certain QMS into the intranet, which is already used by employees. By using SharePoint web parts, notifications and status messages can be tailored, and the right entry points and tasks can be made available to the right employees.

The SharePoint user account is linked to the Certain QMS user account, so information will always be personalised to each individual employee and their role. This system integration is valuable both for employees who have QHSE-related tasks and for other employees who only use the system occasionally to report non-conformities or look up internal procedures.

Employees with QHSE tasks typically work with internal routines and procedures, non-conformity handling and risk analyses. The SharePoint integration makes it easier to keep track of new tasks, or tasks in progress, by making notifications and status messages available on the intranet.

Routines and procedures are stored in the quality management system, but employees find everything on the intranet. Notifications and shortcuts to reading lists ensure that content reaches the organisation and is easily accessible to all.

Employees’ non-conformity reports and improvement suggestions are essential to the organisation’s improvement work, and many municipalities find it particularly challenging to establish a shared system for non-conformity registration and handling. By having non-conformity registration directly in SharePoint, accessibility is increased for all employees, which is an important prerequisite for building a good culture of improvement in the organisation.

Connections between SharePoint and other IT systems are made via what are known as web parts. We have the following web parts for Certain QMS:

• All employees can report non-conformities directly in SharePoint, without having to navigate to the specialist system for non-conformity registration.
• Case handlers for non-conformities can see notifications showing the number of new non-conformities not yet assigned, as well as their own assigned cases and tasks/actions and which cases have exceeded their deadline.

• Search function in SharePoint for internal routines and procedures stored in Certain QMS. Documents can be read directly in SharePoint.
• All employees can view their reading lists in SharePoint and see which documents are marked as unread.
• Authors who produce internal documents can see notifications showing how many documents are awaiting approval, due for revision or out for consultation.

• Employees working with risk analyses can see notifications showing the number of their own risk analyses in progress and the number of actions not yet closed.

As a public administrative body, the municipality has a statutory archiving obligation that also covers internal documents that have value as records. With Certain QMS as a separate specialist system, it must be possible to archive selected documents in accordance with the applicable standard for records management and archiving.

Sarpsborg municipality has defined the scope of which documentation from the quality management system is to be archived in the municipality’s core archive system. These parameters are set during the configuration of Certain QMS so that the solution is customised to do the following:

• Automatically archive all documents consisting of a specified document type/template
• Automatically archive all non-conformity cases within a selected non-conformity category
• Automatically archive all risk analyses marked as archivable

Certain QMS already has integrations with other case management and archiving solutions, but Sarpsborg municipality was the first customer to request an integration with Documaster‘s standalone archive. Documaster’s aim is to give customers an alternative to so-called ‘lock-in’ solutions where the entire organisation’s archive is tightly coupled to a specialist system, such as a case management system.

With Documaster as a standalone and independent partner, Netpower was able, together with Sarpsborg municipality, to define the scope and functionality of the integration. The result is an effective link between the municipality’s quality management system and its digital archive, ensuring that the archiving obligation is maintained outside the specialist system.