ComplianceQuest made some significant announcements at its recent ConQuest customer conference. The first was to identify the space where they play, as a platform and integrated software suite to clean up the messy “middle office.” They also continued to add more agentic AI to the platform to support the people using the applications sitting on it. The other key news came before the event: the release of SupplierQuest, which reaches beyond supplier quality to supplier management, onboarding, collaboration, and performance management.
Cleaning Up the Middle Office
ComplianceQuest has named its vision the Connected Middle Office Platform. Think about how ERP long ago integrated back-office data and workflows, such as HR, Finance, and Supply Chain, for greater efficiency. Since then, CRM has helped optimize the front office activities, including sales, marketing, and service. What’s in the middle? ComplianceQuest says core operations, and they are fragmented, manual, and lack a way to collaborate among functions.
With a proven platform and multi-module solutions for QMS, EHS, Supplier Management, and PLM, ComplianceQuest has a strong story for this middle office. Our research supports the ComplianceQuest view. In our Making Manufacturing Analytics and AI Matter survey, manufacturers’ top investment aim is gaining easy access to high-quality, timely, and complete plant data. Today, many struggle to share operations data, put it in context, and use it to make sound decisions. The ComplianceQuest platform, with its single database, enables collaboration and closed-loop processes across these disciplines and data sets. Consider how a DFMEA can be connected to complaints, CAPAs, and regulatory reports.
AI Agents
AI agents to assist humans in this middle office work are trained only on each customer’s data. ComplianceQuest has incorporated its years of experience in developing these agents. CQ AI agents focus on activities such as generating content, finding and connecting relevant data across the system, forecasting future outcomes, leveraging chat to intake information and create records , and communicating with suppliers through intelligent emails that turn into actionable records . This reduces redundant and duplicated data, enhances worker productivity, and augments data-driven decisions.
ComplianceQuest has been releasing AI since 2022, primarily as categorization and prioritization and retrieve and relate capabilities. Predictive AI is already embedded and is part of the quality maturity index, supplier performance, and safety incidents functionality. AI is a top priority on the CQ roadmap to improve efficiency and costs and mitigate risk with predictions. All of this is embedded in the platform, not separately licensed, as are the advanced analytics.
Supplier Management
In March, ComplianceQuest introduced its SupplierQuality suite, expanding beyond supplier quality to encompass more aspects of supplier relationship management. Examples include:
- Enabling onboarding with collaboration between quality and procurement
- First article inspection to qualify a supplier, pulling the specs and BOM from PLM.
This expansion leverages the collaborative platform and other solutions and adds capabilities to foster greater success with suppliers during a time of supply chain change.
Looking Forward
ComplianceQuest has always leveraged the Salesforce platform for connectivity. As the company builds out its middle office platform and suite, we will continue to watch for new releases, additions, and improvements. Thank you, Nikki Willett, for catching us up on the latest news from ComplianceQuest.