Using External Notifications (QMS)

Organizations often need to send emails to internal and external recipients for various processes in QMS. Using Quality External Notifications, you can define distribution groups, notification templates, send emails and share documents. This addresses several scenarios that your organization may encounter:

  • When an Audit report is completed, that report often needs to be sent to an external recipient, such as the supplier contact, as well as persons associated with the Audit or supplier.
  • In Complaint and Medtech Complaint processes, customers often need to send correspondence letters and forms to the complainant or the reporter associated with the complaint at various times during the event lifecycle.
  • If a serious issue is encountered, such as a critical deviation, and an Issue Escalation process is initiated, upper management external to Vault may need to be notified of the serious event.
  • In Field Corrective Action processes, external parties may need to be notified of Product Action developments.

Tracked Emails

When using Quality External Notifications with Complaint or Medtech Complaint records, Vault notifies the sender of the email if the email was not successfully delivered to the recipient’s email address. After sending the notification email, Vault stores relevant reportable information in Email and Quality Event Sent Notification object records.

Document Packages

Quality External Notifications are capable of sending links to view pre-packaged Vault documents in a special external viewer. For example, in an Audit process, audit reports often need to be sent to external contacts such as suppliers. After sending the notification email, Vault stores a link to the externally-viewable documents in a text field on the applicable object record.

External Notification Recipients

Depending on your Vault’s configuration, the system may either automatically populate distribution groups for an external notification when the applicable record reaches a certain lifecycle state, allow you to populate them via the Create Distribution Group Memberships user action, or allow you to manually populate distribution groups.

If a person record includes parentheses or an email address in the name, emails will not reach the external notification recipient associated with the affected person record. Ensure that you do not create any person records with parentheses or an email address in the name if you plan to use Quality External Notifications.

How to Send an External Notification

In some cases, Vault sends Quality External Notifications automatically, for example, as part of an entry action. In cases where your process does not send these notifications automatically, you may need to perform the action manually:

  1. Navigate to the applicable record detail page in Business Admin or from a custom object tab.
  2. Expand the Notification Recipients section and verify that the distribution groups contain the correct Person records. You may need to perform the Create Distribution Group Memberships action to populate the distribution groups. The availability and label of this action may differ depending on your Vault’s configuration.
  3. If you need to change the contacts, click Manage Recipients, then select the appropriate contacts in each distribution group box. The contacts in these boxes correspond to Person object records in your Vault. Click Save when finished. Some distribution groups may not be editable.
  4. Perform the Send External Notification action. The label of this action may differ depending on your Vault’s configuration.
  5. In the dialog, choose an appropriate template from the Select Notification Template drop-down.
  6. Make any necessary changes to the Additional Recipients and Users associated to the following roles fields. These fields may not be editable, depending on your Vault’s configuration.
  7. Click Send.

To view the Notification Recipients section and Manage Recipients, users require a security profile or role which grants the Read and Edit permissions on the following objects:

  • Audit-Ext Notif Recipient
  • Issue Escalation-Ext Notif Recipient
  • Quality Event-Ext Notif Recipient
  • Complaint-Ext Notif Recipient
  • Product Action-Ext Notif Recipient

In order to manage recipients on objects with external notifications enabled, users require Read permissions on the Person object.

In order to view the Sent Notifications section on Audit records, users require Read permissions on the following objects:

  • Audit Sent Notification
  • Issue Escalation Sent Notification
  • Quality Event Sent Notification
  • Complaint Sent Notification
  • Product Action-Ext Notif Recipient