A common complaint among in-house legal teams is getting sales teams to provide the right information during the intake process. When creating new contracts for new or existing customers, there is a direct relationship between sales and legal teams. And it continues from intake through deal management – involving everything from contract creation to review to execution to renewal.
Although sales teams are generally tasked with starting the contract generation process, they aren’t necessarily good at intake. It’s tedious, boring and can get in the way of closing the deal and earning a commission. To further complicate matters for a sales representative, there are often subtleties that have been pre-negotiated that may seem totally innocuous to sales, but are legally significant. These facts may be left out all together on an intake request.
To reduce the work required to create new, accurate contracts, some lawyers create customized templates to capture all the information they need. But those ad-hoc solutions often fail as incorrect data gets inputted, the whole process is ignored, or the template is hastily completed.
One example of a common roadblock can be highlighted by examining the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) drafting and signing process, often required for business to move forward. The first question to address is whether an NDA exists with any given customer. If so, where is it? If none exists, what will it take to get one created and signed? People spend too much time hunting down the NDA with a flurry of back-and-forth e-mails. Wouldn’t it be nice if this standard document was included in the process and easy to access from the beginning?
Intake challenges also include the input of incorrect information – everything from the use of outdated templates to unreviewed legal language or repetitive or obviously unnecessary errors or omissions. These issues simply frustrate the lawyers who are tasked with ensuring each contract brings with it minimal exposure to risk for the business.
In most sales circumstances, both sides will have a champion –a sales rep on one side, a buyer champion (sometimes called Sales Point of Contact, or SPOC), on the other. Both sides will work with their own legal representatives, who will offer comments and red lines. It’s not unusual for this process to happen again and again, wasting everyone’s time and resources. It’s the sales rep’s responsibility to manage the process – even though most don’t enjoy doing this and aren’t particularly good at it. Often, to move the process along, both sides will engage their own legal representatives in a phone or video conversation, an expensive and time-consuming exercise that often dissolves into a barrage of e-mails that can introduce errors into the whole process.
Each one of these cycles can be its own “mini-intake,” and can be subject to all of the above problems and frustrations that come with it.
One solution is to enlist the help of deal desk software – preferably one that is driven by artificial intelligence (AI) so it can continue to learn from all the changes and significantly improve the process. For example, Advocat offers a platform that enables collaborative redlining by centralizing all activity so that it’s easy to access and use.
Using software offers simple solutions to these problems that come up during the intake and deal management process. Here are some things the software can do, leading to significant returns on investment for companies that employ this evolving technology.
How deal desk software can help
Coordination: A virtual deal desk solution allows everyone to see the same information at the same time, avoiding cumbersome and time-consuming communication chains. This allows for a single source on negotiated documents, eliminating the many different versions of Word documents that users attach to emails and circulate around, getting messy and out of sync.
Overcoming issues: Deal desk software provides tools that make it easy for the legal team to show what they have done so it’s easier to approve changes.
Empowerment: A virtual deal desk empowers everyone involved to leverage all features embedded in the software, allowing all employees to use the tools to quickly move deals forward.
Essentially, intake problems are a symptom of bad incentives, confusion, and dis-empowerment. Adopting deal desk software can solve these problems by increasing communication, reducing confusion and overcoming disempowerment. When adopted correctly, deal desks can not only reduce frustration among and between the sales and legal teams, it can save the company time, money, and increase revenues by allowing deals to close quicker.
This is a collaborative effort, requiring support from all stakeholders involved.
Here are some examples:
Highlighting areas of confusion when redlining documents reduces the number of areas that don’t matter and allows resolution without escalation. This also points directly to things that actually DO matter and require escalation. AI can tell the difference, allowing the legal team to focus on what is truly important.
AI can unify the sales playbook with guardrails set up by the legal department. Frequently, everyone has a different view on what the ideal contract result should be. By aligning those views early in the process – and allowing the software to help – internal processes will be improved.
Deal desks allow shared and transparent timelines. The sales team may want to close a deal before the end of the quarter or around a buyer’s budget cycle. But the legal department may have a three-month backlog of work, frustrating the sales team, which may covertly try to avoid the legal process and create contracts on their own. It’s imperative for both sides to understand each other’s timeline to avoid conflict or risky actions such as the execution of non-vetted contracts.
Deal desk software empowers employees on all sides of the deal to quickly and easily solve problems by putting everyone in the same virtual room – both synchronously and asynchronously – to manage their time in an efficient way.
If you’re on the sales side, don’t let intake and deal management challenges get in the way of closing your next deal. If you’re on the legal side, be confident your sales team is working in the most efficient and legally prudent manner. Consider employing a virtual deal desk to improve your processes and bottom line.
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A Statement of Work outlines the scope of work to be performed and identifies the objectives, tasks, and schedule. Here’s what you need to know.
Statement of Work (SOW) documents are extremely detailed and binding contracts that specify all the details of a project, including hierarchies of reporting, timelines, budgets, deliverables, dependencies, resources, and other terms and conditions agreed upon by all stakeholders. It is a complete project plan that lays down the groundwork for the working process of the project from start to finish.
An SOW document is imperative in order to begin work on any project for effective project management. It is a clearly written project management plan detailing the minutest aspects of the project to bring all the stakeholders on the same page.
Managing a project begins with a well-constructed SOW document. A comprehensive SOW agreement defines each and every aspect of the project in clear terms to all parties involved. It describes the scope of work, including daily tasks, due dates, the governance process, quality assurance, and deliverables, along with the suitable facilities, resources, equipment, training, and budget required to make the project feasible.
A formal SOW document is especially helpful when working with external resources or outsourcing projects to vendors or third parties. It serves as a legally binding contract that comes into play in case of disputes arising due to failure to deliver, financial dues, discrepancies in the end product delivered, missed due dates, etc.
Scope of Work ensures that all stakeholders are on the same page regarding the deliverables of the project. It deals with a brief overview of the project, the list of tasks, a detailed description of services, members, or teams responsible for tasks and services, due dates, expected outcomes, and deliverables.
On the other hand, the Statement of Work encompasses the Scope of Work plus other aspects of project management like budget allocation, financing, resources, equipment provisioning, training, payment processing, performance management, and so on.
An SOW (Statement of Work) document is especially helpful when managing projects in software development as it regulates the service agreements between two or more teams, between developers and vendors, or between IT firms collaborating on building a software product. Although it's not composed as a legal document, it can have legal repercussions when not adhered to.
A clearly written SOW template in software development project management includes explicit descriptions for the following crucial points:
Includes an introduction, a brief overview, and pointers on the reasons and objectives of the project, the processes involved, the end goal, and what it would take to get there.
Where will the vendors, contractors, managers, developers, and other stakeholders work from? Office, remote, or overseas locations?
This section describes the list of tasks, task due dates, responsible teams and members, reporting structure, and task outcomes.
Date of project commencement, task due dates, major milestones, and dates for project conclusion.
This section defines what is to be delivered, when, and how.
This section deals with quality testing, feedback loops, and other standard procedures to maintain the integrity of the deliverables.
A list of all the facilities, equipment, dependencies, technical know-how, tools for project management, and other resources like training, upskilling, etc., required to ensure the successful completion of the project.
This section deals with the budget allocated to the project, payment schedule, services and goods purchase, invoicing, and other financial aspects of the project.
Things not covered in the above eight sections, like travel expenditure, payment for short-term external services, security issues, confidentiality clauses, etc., are usually covered under separate headings dedicated to the topics.
This section deals with what constitutes the successful completion of the project. It mentions the standard of acceptable deliverables within the agreed-upon timeline, with the allocated budget, and every other aspect, so there's no confusion or communication gap between what's expected and what's delivered.
The closing section deals with the project completion procedures and lists all the paperwork, product releases, and other paraphernalia to conclude the partnership.
Here's a quick list of downloadable templates for different types of SOWs.
If you are in the business of developing and managing projects or building software products and services, you'll be in frequent need of clearly composed SOW documents. Although you can easily plan a project using tools like Dropbox Paper, it doesn't help you write a thorough SOW document. Instead of writing one from scratch for each project, you can rely on web-based portals that specialize in generating proposal documents, Scope of Work documents, and SOW agreements.
Better known as digital contracting apps, these portals provide everything from readymade software contracts and legal documents to tools to manage a project, negotiate the terms, customize documents per project requirements, and measure the progress of your software development project. Here's a shortlist of such digital apps to help you with your SOW agreements.
Whether you're a freelance software developer, a member of a team of developers, or a software firm that hires vendors, it's a given that you'll need to write or sign an SOW document sooner or later.
You can use the free downloadable templates listed above, or outsource this process to software services that make the process easier and also provide free Scope of Work templates.
Former corporate communications specialist who's worked with Uber, Google, and TCS, Al Kaatib has ten years of experience as a freelance writer specializing in B2B and B2C content.

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An effective combination of workflow, team collaboration, and document management, Microsoft SharePoint Online is an easy pick for our Editors' Choice designation. But make sure you need all this power because its price can be significant.
Microsoft has had to fight harder in the past few years to maintain its leadership in the productivity space; something that Microsof Office platform used to manage almost effortlessly. To help set it apart, the company has developed several back-office enhancements for Office and made them available in the cloud. Chief among these is Microsoft SharePoint Online, a very powerful combination of customizable workflow, team collaboration, and document management. In combination with Microsoft Office and Office 365, SharePoint Online can quickly implement broad productivity improvements in many organizations. While it carries a potentially high price tag once all users and options are accounted for (though it starts at just $5 per user per month), it’s still an easy pick for our Editors’ Choice in document management, along with Ascensio System OnlyOffice.
Microsoft doesn’t offer a free trial of Microsoft SharePoint Online, though the 30-day trial for Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E3 does include access to Microsoft SharePoint Online (make sure you sign up for the Enterprise E3 trial as Microsoft also offers trial versions of Office 365 Home Premium and Business Premium but neither of these tiers includes Microsoft SharePoint Online). Microsoft SharePoint Online has two paid plans, named simply “Plan 1” and “Plan 2.” Plan 1 (which begins at $5 per user per month) includes really everything you would expect from a document management platform: support for multiple document libraries, collaboration tools, sharing with internal or external users, content management, records management, and workflows. Plan 2 (which begins at $10 per user per month) adds a number of advanced features, including customizable search capabilities, e-discovery, and compliance tools such as auditing and in-place hold.
You can also gain access to Microsoft SharePoint Online through any of the Enterprise tiers in Microsoft Office 365. The Office 365 Enterprise E1 tier provides Microsoft SharePoint Online access equivalent to Plan 1 as well as access to Exchange Online with 50GB mailboxes, Microsoft Teams ($5.00 Per User Per Month, Billed Annually at Microsoft 365 for Business)(Opens in a new window) , and online versions of Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Word.
Office 365 Enterprise E3 adds desktop versions of Office 2016 (up to five installations per user) as well as mobile apps, unlimited Microsoft OneDrive ($5.00 Per User Per Month at Microsoft 365 for Business)(Opens in a new window) storage, and the addition of document management capabilities. Such capabilities include manual retention and deletion policies, manual document classifications, and eDiscovery (a suite of tools that lets you find documents related to litigation or information requests, and take appropriate action such as placing a hold on the documents or exporting the files). Office 365 Enterprise E5 adds to the eDiscovery toolset with analytics, automated document classification, and import through Advanced Data Governance. Pricing for Office 365 Enterprise tiers is calculated as a monthly rate per user with an annual commitment. Pricing begins at $8 per user per month for E1, $20 per user per month for E3, and $35 per user per month for E5.


It’s simple to sign up with Microsoft SharePoint Online. Just pick a plan and provide your name, email, phone number, company, and address. Then, create a user ID, password, and a unique URL (e.g., yourname.onmicrosoft.com). After that, verify that you’re not a robot by inputting a code that will be sent to you via a text or phone call. Finally, input your payment information and choose whether to pay monthly or annually. Payment information is not required if you opt for the free trial.
If it’s your first experience with Office 365, then you may encounter a bit of information overload when you first log in. If you have signed up for the free trial of Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E3, then your dashboard will include over a dozen tiles linked to various Microsoft programs and features included in the Enterprise E3 tier. One of these tiles is Microsoft SharePoint Online. In addition, you can access the administrative aspects of Microsoft SharePoint Online under the Admin module by using the Admin Centers menu on the left-hand side.

Microsoft SharePoint Online lets users create individual sites as an organization and management entity. Each SharePoint site can have its own document library, notebooks, security, and design. In addition, sites can be organized as standalone sites or in a hierarchy through the use of subsites. When creating a site, you’re prompted to choose between a Team site or a Communication site. Team sites are the traditional SharePoint sites, intended for collaboration within an organization, particularly where a significant percentage of the users will be involved in document management. Communication sites are useful for scenarios in which an individual or small group is creating content to be consumed by a larger group of users; think of it as a cross between a document library and a blog. Both site options can be used to share documents and are highly customizable.
Team sites in Microsoft SharePoint Online are flexible, provided someone is willing to navigate the learning curve. A site’s document library, for example, can be configured with numerous metadata fields, which can be leveraged for a number of different functions. A document view can be customized to show specific fields for you to use to search and sort. A view can also be filtered to only display documents with matching metadata, which would let you create multiple views, each customized to show a specific set of documents.

Microsoft SharePoint Online document libraries can be synchronized with your computer or mobile device by using the Microsoft OneDrive client. Desktop users can simply click the Sync button within the document library to configure the connection (or download the software). New files can be added to the document library through drag-and-drop, copying files into a synced folder on your desktop, or by using various Office apps on desktop or mobile devices. One knock against Microsoft SharePoint Online for many years was due to the unpredictability of the OneDrive sync client. Microsoft has since released a new OneDrive client, which seems to do a much better job of keeping your files in sync.

At its core, Microsoft SharePoint Online is a document management platform. In addition to basic document management capabilities, such as file uploads and downloads, editing, and sharing, Microsoft SharePoint Online handles change tracking, too. Keeping a log of who made edits and letting you download previous editions of your document to review changes or return to a previous revision lends quite a bit of flexibility to Microsoft SharePoint Online. Users can also configure alerts on a document library to receive a notification when changes are made. Documents can be checked out to prevent issues with multiple people editing the same file, though co-authoring (multiple users editing the same file simultaneously) is also supported for modern Office docs, assuming all users are using Office 2010 or later.
Microsoft offers some fairly hefty security and compliance features in Office 365, many of which can be leveraged against Microsoft SharePoint Online. Most other business-grade document management suites, such as Ascensio System OnlyOffice (40.00 Per Year at ONLYOFFICE)(Opens in a new window) , offer basic security features such as permissions and audit tracking. Microsoft SharePoint Online supports these features as well but also includes features an order of magnitude above the competition. For starters, you can create policies that handle things such as document labels, data loss prevention, document retention, and supervisor access. Document labels are used to identify documents that may have sensitive data, such as credit cards, social security numbers, or customer data.

SharePoint offers tools to not only create and manage these labels, but to apply them to existing documents (or even emails if you’re using a full Office 365 suite) based on the contents of the document. Similar tools are available to prevent data loss, such as preventing documents that contain sensitive information from being shared outside your organization. Tools are also available for managing document retention, both for preventing users from permanently deleting documents and for enforcing archival or removal after a defined period of time. In many of these cases, Microsoft offers a predefined set of filters designed to facilitate compliance with regulations in various countries, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act(Opens in a new window) (HIPAA) and corresponding regulations. You can also configure policy application by using search terms. These policies can be applied across Microsoft SharePoint Online or to individual sites.
Audit logging can be used to track user-level activities or administrative changes. Once logging is enabled, you can search the audit log for specific actions, users, time windows, or search terms in order to focus your view. One feature that was mentioned previously, eDiscovery, is a comprehensive tool for locating documents related to a specific topic such as a legal action. By using eDiscovery, you can locate documents that are within the scope of a subpoena or other information request, protect relevant documents by placing a hold on them, or even export relevant files in order to comply with the request.
If these security features sound intimidating, then know that they are completely optional and won’t get in your way if you choose to ignore them. More standard security options, such as group- or user-based permissions, are also available. You also can configure how file sharing outside your organization works, such as sharing only to authenticated users, setting expiration periods for anonymous access, or using groups to manage who can share documents externally. You can also configure share links to provide read-only access to your documents.

Microsoft SharePoint has supported workflow creation for some time now and SharePoint Online is no exception. While most document management systems with a workflow module support basic document management tasks, such as review routing or signature requests, Microsoft SharePoint Online tightly integrates with Microsoft Flow, a tool for creating workflows between disparate platforms. By using Flow, you can send approval requests when documents are loaded to a library, integrate with Microsoft Forms to route information to the appropriate contact, or link a document library with a third-party cloud storage platform such as DropBox Business or Google Drive for Work. Microsoft offers over a hundred Flow templates, or you can roll your own.
Another area Microsoft is pushing as an integration point into their holistic information management platform is Microsoft PowerApps (7.00 Per User Per Month at PowerApps)(Opens in a new window) . The intent behind PowerApps is that users can very easily (in relative terms) create an app that can capture and store data in Microsoft SharePoint (even using Flow). These PowerApps can be listed in the Microsoft Store and used for either internal business processes or as customer-facing portals.
Speaking of apps, Microsoft’s long-standing relationship with developers means that the Microsoft SharePoint app catalog is chock-full of apps you can integrate into your Microsoft SharePoint sites. These apps come in both paid and free options but you should be aware that even the free apps come with a price. Microsoft SharePoint app permissions are much like you’d expect on your mobile device, and each app includes a list of things that the app will be able to do with your documents and data, so they should be handled with the appropriate care. Under the right circumstances, Microsoft SharePoint apps can add functionality such as enhanced notification capabilities, additional calendar options, integration into other services, and a host of other options.
Microsoft SharePoint’s reputation for being difficult to manage or even use is the result of its focus on features over usability. With Microsoft’s increased focus on making Office 365 and its various components accessible to part-time admins (particularly those thrust into the role out of necessity), Microsoft SharePoint Online is a revelation in terms of offering advanced features that appeal to enterprise customers without delivering a solution so complex it can’t be used by smaller IT shops. To be fair, there are still some intricacies of managing Microsoft SharePoint, including multiple locations for administrative settings. But most of the features are much more straightforward to configure than they’ve been in the past.
Microsoft’s Office 365 pricing is aggressive and Microsoft SharePoint Online can be had for a very reasonable $5 per user per month. But that’s still a far cry from the $1-per-user-per-month pricing you can get from competitor Ascensio System OnlyOffice, our other Editors’ Choice. Still, based on its new ease-of-use focus, the advanced collaboration and security features offered with Flow, eDiscovery, and the wide variety of configurable management policies, Microsoft SharePoint Online easily earns one of our Editors’ Choice awards in the document management category.
An effective combination of workflow, team collaboration, and document management, Microsoft SharePoint Online is an easy pick for our Editors' Choice designation. But make sure you need all this power because its price can be significant.
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Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) has been a growing focus for Asset Managers over the past few years going quickly from Alternative data to Essential in the overall investment process. The continued appetite from investors and a changing regulatory landscape have all contributed to estimates that ESG will surpass $41 trillion in 2022 and $50 trillion by 2025.
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Research can be more transparent and collaborative by using Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles to publish Earth and environmental science data. Reporting formats—instructions, templates, and tools for consistently formatting data within a discipline—can help make data more accessible and reusable. However, the immense diversity of data types across Earth science disciplines makes development and adoption challenging. Here, we describe 11 community reporting formats for a diverse set of Earth science (meta)data including cross-domain metadata (dataset metadata, location metadata, sample metadata), file-formatting guidelines (file-level metadata, CSV files, terrestrial model data archiving), and domain-specific reporting formats for some biological, geochemical, and hydrological data (amplicon abundance tables, leaf-level gas exchange, soil respiration, water and sediment chemistry, sensor-based hydrologic measurements). More broadly, we provide guidelines that communities can use to create new (meta)data formats that integrate with their scientific workflows. Such reporting formats have the potential to accelerate scientific discovery and predictions by making it easier for data contributors to provide (meta)data that are more interoperable and reusable.
Making Earth and environmental science data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)^1,2 contributes to research that is more transparent and reproducible³. Search engines and data repositories^2,4,5 have enabled advances in data preservation, findability, and accessibility. However, data interoperability and reuse remain major challenges in part due to the diversity of Earth science data, and because researchers may lack time and funding for data management or awareness of tools and resources to make data more reusable^5,6. This results in barriers to scientific research and knowledge generation; for example, synthesis of data across different sources can be extremely time-consuming when data and metadata are not standardized in a common, well-defined format.
Standards for data and metadata, hereafter referred to as (meta)data standards, have been proposed as important elements to make Earth and environmental science data easier to find, understand and reuse^7,8,9,10. Formal (meta)data standards are typically accredited by large governing bodies and emphasize making data broadly reusable¹¹. For example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 8601 standard provides guidelines for formatting date and timestamps and has been adopted in a wide range of research and business sectors¹². The Open Geospatial Consortium’s Sensor Observation Service standard¹³ outlines standardized ways of pulling sensor data from web interfaces. Such accredited standards are extraordinarily useful, but are available only for a few environmental data types and can take over a decade to build governing processes and consensus.
In contrast, reporting formats are community efforts aimed at harmonizing diverse environmental data types without the oversight of the governing protocols or working groups that maintain vocabularies and extensive documentation. There are reporting formats for different research domains and data types including water quality¹⁴ and meteorological data¹⁵. Reporting formats are typically more focused within scientific domains—for example, marine observations¹⁶ or solid earth geoscience¹⁷. Reporting formats can enable efficient collection and harmonization of information needed to understand and reuse specific types of data within a research community. For example, the use of FLUXNET’s half-hourly flux and meteorological reporting format¹⁸ enables both access and reuse of consistently formatted carbon, water, and energy flux data from thousands of sampling locations across the world. However, reporting formats do not exist for most environmental data types, and even if they do, complexity and lack of resources can limit their adoption⁹.
There are many scientific benefits when research communities adopt reporting formats, ranging from organizing data collection in the field or lab to more efficient data reuse in synthesis and modeling efforts. Reporting formats can facilitate data sharing within a group, provide guidelines for consistent data collection, enable streamlined scientific workflows, and enable long-term preservation of knowledge that may not be typically stored or reported with the data^19,20. Moreover, research disciplines are beginning to operationalize and implement practices^21,22 to achieve the original FAIR guiding principles^21,22. Reporting formats developed by the research communities for which they are intended are seen as a critical step toward achieving greater data interoperability and reuse²².
A variety of multidisciplinary data are generated in research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and stored in the Environmental Systems Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE) data repository^4,23. Integration and analysis of diverse data types such as hydrological, geological, ecological, biological, and climatological data is an essential element of complex environmental systems science (ESS) research. However, such interdisciplinary data integration presents unique challenges, such as inconsistent use of terms, formats, and metadata across disciplines²⁴. In this manuscript, we describe and harmonize 11 diverse and complementary (meta)data reporting formats that our interdisciplinary team developed for commonly used data types in ESS research to enable their archival following FAIR principles in general purpose repositories such as ESS-DIVE. These include guidelines to format and describe general research elements (e.g., general file metadata, tabular data, physical samples, model data), as well as guidelines developed for more specific data types relevant to interdisciplinary research (e.g., biogeochemical samples, soil respiration, leaf-level gas exchange). As part of this process, we adopted or used components of existing reporting formats or standards to the greatest extent possible, and also developed new reporting formats for some data types. These can be used individually or collectively in scientific workflows, and many of the formats are widely applicable for environmental research. Moreover, the process we used for developing the formats—including our approach to obtain community consensus, mirror documentation across several web platforms, and track community feedback—can be used by other research communities to develop reporting formats for their own purposes.
Our community-centric approach to developing reporting formats had four key outcomes that are broadly important to making scientific data more reusable. First, the teams reviewed a total of 112 pre-existing data standards and other data resources (data repositories, data systems, datasets, projects) to create (meta)data crosswalks (Supplementary Files 1–20). Such crosswalks provide a tabular map of existing resources related to each data type, allowing the teams to identify gaps in existing standards, and determine which variables, terms, and metadata were essential to harmonize and incorporate into their reporting formats. At the onset of the review process, ESS-DIVE recommended adopting existing standards to the extent possible. However, we found that for all 11 data types, none entirely met ESS research community needs, and this necessitated development of all 11 reporting formats.
Second, we created 11 reporting formats (Supplementary Table 1) that encompass a range of complex and diverse ESS (meta)data fields that can be used when researchers upload data to ESS-DIVE. Six of the reporting formats created by our community of scientists are cross-domain reporting formats (Fig. 1a), which apply broadly to data across different scientific disciplines. These reporting formats were developed to help researchers more consistently format their (meta)data for interdisciplinary science applications and include basic dataset metadata for citation and findability²⁵, file-level metadata²⁶, guidelines for formatting comma separated value (CSV) files²⁷, sample metadata²⁸, terrestrial model data archiving guidelines²⁹, and research locations metadata³⁰. The remaining five reporting formats apply to different domain data types (Fig. 1b) and include microbial amplicon abundance tables³¹, leaf-level gas exchange³², soil respiration³³, sample-based water and soil chemistry measurements³⁴, and water level and sonde-based hydrologic measurements³⁵. All reporting formats have a minimal set of required metadata fields necessary for programmatic data parsing and optional fields that provide detailed spatial/temporal context about the sample useful to downstream scientific analyses. Throughout development, we aimed to strike a balance between pragmatism for the scientists reporting data and machine-actionability that is emblematic of FAIR data. A comparison between FAIR guiding principles and our reporting formats (Supplementary Table 2) highlights how a community-centric effort like ours can move data archiving towards achieving many FAIR data principles (though see discussion for limitations).
Workflow to help determine which (meta)data reporting formats apply to datasets. The set of 11 ESS-DIVE (meta)data formats are either (a) cross-domain guidelines that can be applied to many data types or (b) are data type-specific. For those archiving data with ESS-DIVE, researchers can upload data through the ESS-DIVE web user interface¹⁵⁵ or programmatically through an API.
Together, these 11 reporting formats are part of a flexible, modular, and integrated framework (Fig. 1) that can accommodate new reporting formats in the future, and enable their findability and accessibility individually or collectively. As part of the framework development, all teams created templates with harmonized terms and formats to be internally consistent as much as possible. For example, dates are always reported in YYYY-MM-DD format. Whenever reporting formats include spatial data, the variables are harmonized as “latitude” and “longitude” and reported in decimal degrees with common bounds (−90 to 90 and −180 to 180, respectively). All formats that require CSV files adopted as many recommendations from the CSV reporting format as possible. Data collected using the water and soil chemistry, and amplicon reporting formats have an option to report a persistent identifier for associated samples [International Generic Sample Number (IGSN)], to enable effective tracking across online data systems, as outlined in the Sample ID reporting format.
The third outcome is related to how we shared and archived all reporting formats in three ways, each with a distinct use. First, all reporting formats are published as datasets in the ESS-DIVE repository, which enables direct, public download and citation upon use. Second, each reporting format is hosted on the version control platform GitHub, which enables ongoing edits and versioning while also allowing users to provide feedback³⁶. Third, the most up-to-date reporting format content from GitHub is rendered as a project website through the service GitBook³⁷. We mirrored the reporting format instructions and templates across several web platforms to ensure the documentation is available in a variety of digital formats to serve the needs of various user groups and stakeholders. GitHub is likely a more familiar platform and user interface for software engineers and informatics specialists, for example, while GitBook websites may be preferred by Earth science researchers.
Lastly, we formulated guidelines (Box 1) for research communities that want to replicate our model of community-centric (meta)data reporting format development. We encourage (1) reviewing existing standards, (2) developing a crosswalk of terms across relevant standards or ontologies of interest, (3) iteratively developing templates and documentation with feedback from prospective users, (4) assembling a minimum set of (meta)data required for reuse, and (5) hosting finalized documentation on platforms that can be publicly accessed and updated easily.
1. Research existing (meta)data standards and other data resources across agencies and organizations both within the US and internationally.
2. Create a (meta)data crosswalk (Supplementary Files 1–10) to define how other standards and data resources translate to the proposed reporting format.
3. Work with the scientific community to iteratively develop and obtain feedback (see Fig. 2) on (meta)data reporting format.
4. Develop documentation (instructions, templates, variables, descriptions, units, metadata) to support the format. Consider appropriate file formats for any templates.
5. Archive finalized version of the reporting format in a long-term data repository as well as a version control platform (e.g., GitHub³⁷).
Many scientific journals and funders require data deposition in long-term repositories. However, in many cases, data are submitted to repositories in bespoke formats with little (meta)data standardization⁵. Community-led (meta)data reporting formats like the set described in this paper can enable archived data to be more reusable and interoperable^21,22. Our scientist-centric approach to creating the formats helped to determine workflows that are most useful and practical for researchers to adopt. Here we discuss important aspects that need to be considered in development and use of such reporting formats.
Reporting formats can help researchers organize and synthesize their own (meta)data for their research purposes. It can be challenging for small teams, or even individuals to keep track of data collected over multi-year field campaigns or laboratory experiments^19,20. Early adoption of a consistent way of compiling data can help individuals or research teams avoid ad hoc data collection practices and also help researchers efficiently integrate their data, particularly when multiple analyses or teams are involved.
Moreover, community reporting formats can lead to greater data accessibility and reuse. For example, researchers in the Ameriflux network³⁸ organize flux data in the Flux Processing (FP-in) reporting format¹⁸. When participants in the network agree to provide their flux data in this format³⁹, benefits include: 1) access to data services such as automated QA/QC of datasets and value-added ONEFlux data processing⁴⁰, 2) Digital Object Identifier assignment which helps to track dataset citation and reuse, and 3) potential to increase findability of their data. Similarly, when contributors upload datasets on ESS-DIVE, they are offered automated metadata quality assessments, and published data are assigned DOIs and made searchable across the DataONE network. In another example, the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area project⁴¹ adopted ESS-DIVE’s water and soil chemistry reporting format as an initial step towards establishing a field data workflow in a community observatory where diverse hydrological, geochemical, geophysical, ecological, and remote sensing datasets are collected⁴². The use of the reporting format will make it possible for researchers to synthesize data on chemical concentrations both within and across field locations.
Application of the reporting formats also allows for the use of tools and services that enhance data curation, findability and reuse. As an example, some of the fields in ESS-DIVE’s dataset metadata reporting format²⁵ allow programmatic metadata quality validation, which checks for field presence, format, and length. Because these metadata can be mapped to a variety of machine-readable metadata formats including JSON-LD and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) reporting formats⁴³. This further enabled transforming and disseminating ESS-DIVE datasets across other platforms such as Google Dataset Search, DataONE, OSTI and DataCite.
The development of these reporting formats was driven by the scientific need for practical tools for data management, while improving the potential for data reuse achieving many of the FAIR guiding principles (Supplementary Table 2). We made several pragmatic choices to ensure that the reporting formats would have a low barrier to adoption by time-limited researchers. This included investigating whether using pre-existing reporting formats “off the shelf” would meet project and researcher’s scientific needs and workflows. Although it is desirable to use existing formats whenever possible, we found that there were many circumstances when they do not directly apply to a scientific community’s research (meta)data needs. For example, although the Water Quality Exchange format¹⁴ is used within the United States to report water quality monitoring data by local, state, and federal agencies, the format was not entirely suitable for ESS-DIVE’s purposes. Some of the concerns raised by the community included: 1) the structure of the data and metadata templates that are used for regulatory reporting were considered to be cumbersome and inefficient for scientific use (e.g., containing redundant elements of sampling and analytical methodology along with the data) and 2) the required vocabularies (as specified in the template dictionary) were found to be difficult to use because they included several terms that were unnecessary, while missing terms for specific analytes of interest to the community.
To address these concerns, we developed the ESS-DIVE reporting format for sample-based water and soil chemistry³⁴ that is more suitable for files typically generated in scientific laboratories. It borrows elements from the WQX standard, but provides flexibility in format and terminology, while capturing sufficient metadata and vocabularies to enable data exploration and reuse including the ability to use scripts to compare and combine different datasets³⁴. In this way, the water and soil chemistry reporting format achieves some component of FAIR guiding principle “I2” that suggests using ontologies, while still being responsive to a research community that desired flexibility in research terminology (Supplementary Table 2).
Similarly, when creating the sample ID metadata reporting format, we decided to extend the existing IGSN sample identifier template and guidelines in ESS-DIVE’s Sample ID reporting format to meet researchers’ need to link interdisciplinary environmental and biological samples, and to minimize effort in providing information for sample collections⁴⁴. In this case, incorporating IGSNs ensures that researchers using this format achieve FAIR principle “F3” and have globally unique identifiers for their data products, which facilitates tracking associated sample data across multiple online data systems. In an effort to be pragmatic, we decided to lower the threshold for adoption of the sample ID reporting format (and nearly all others; Supplementary Table 2) by compromising on elements that would achieve FAIR principle “I3” related to machine readable knowledge representation. All reporting formats encourage users to define variables in a data dictionary. Though this may not be fully machine readable according to the FAIR principles²¹, this method of defining variables is a key step toward reusable and machine actionable data. The feedback gathered when creating our Sample ID reporting format was then provided to the broader IGSN community to help improve the IGSN metadata template for interdisciplinary science^45,46.
Through the process, we learned that many (meta)data standards are not accessible to a typical researcher and require a significant learning curve to become fluent in the informatics terminology used by established data standards. For example, the Open Geospatial Consortium’s data standard for environmental sensors¹³ is a detailed schema described over 100 pages, which is challenging for a typical scientific researcher to understand and implement. Hence, we had to make several pragmatic choices to ensure that the reporting formats would be amenable to adoption by time-limited researchers. Once choice involved replacing terms in existing standards with words that were more intuitive to scientists. For example, whilst there was no reporting format for leaf-level gas exchange data, a crosswalk of the instrument output from a relatively small number of instrument manufacturers quickly identified a common terminology that already had broad acceptance and use by the scientific community (Supplementary File 7). By using crosswalks (Supplementary Files 1–10) our teams were able to map ESS-DIVE’s reporting formats to many existing (meta)data standards and other data resources, and, in the future, will allow building tools that enable interoperability with different systems. We also simplified the reporting format templates and instructions to the greatest extent possible by specifying a few required fields and several more optional fields to provide additional details.
Our model and guidelines of supporting and empowering the scientific community to develop (meta)data reporting formats that meet their needs can enable other communities to undertake these internal data standardization efforts that make their data even more useful beyond the purpose for which they were collected (Box 1). We acknowledge that other research infrastructures have made important strides toward data standardization within research communities though they can still take dozens of years to manifest¹⁷. We found value in including a broad range of stakeholders in the process, and included field personnel who make the measurements, instrument manufacturers, and scientists who use the data in models or synthesis activities⁴⁷.
There are incentives that can help promote widespread adoption of these or other formats to justify the time investment required for individual researchers or teams into scientific workflows. First, involving data collectors and reusers at the core of the development process makes the resulting formats more pragmatic and scientifically useful. Importantly, the domain scientists involved in the reporting format development became community ambassadors and helped engage their use by fellow researchers through conference presentations and peer-reviewed papers^44,47,48,49. Second, we expanded our user community by sharing information about the reporting formats through a series of webinars, documentation, tutorials, and personalized community outreach. These incentives have had some success, as evidenced by the datasets submitted to ESS-DIVE using one or more of the reporting formats within a few months after they were finalized (Table 1).
We identify some future work that can potentially lower the barrier to adopting reporting formats, provide added benefits to those who use the formats, and make (meta)data FAIRer¹⁰. Currently, ESS-DIVE applies a set of manual checks to datasets uploaded to ESS-DIVE that follow the reporting format. However, development of automated formatting checkers⁵⁰ would help users instantly validate their datasets against reporting format guidelines. Other types of software can also be built around the reporting formats. For example, software could be developed to automatically convert sensor or instrument-derived data into the units requested by a reporting format. As a starting point for this work, the file-level metadata reporting format already includes an open-source script⁵¹ that enables reading and parsing data files submitted in that format. The leaf-level gas exchange reporting format includes a detailed translation table matching the reporting format data variables with standard outputs from 10 commonly used, commercially produced instruments. This could provide the foundation for development of conversion software to automatically format data with the recommended variable names and units. ESS-DIVE is also planning a data integration and fusion component of the repository that will facilitate synthesizing and analyzing datasets that adhere to any of the 11 ESS-DIVE reporting formats. Enabling advanced queries within the files will require development of software and data parsers so that a great number of reporting formats achieve FAIR principle “F4” which calls for data to be fully searchable.
With more data being generated than ever, reusable data can have substantial societal, economic, and scientific impacts. But for Earth and environmental science data, which are complex and heterogeneous, achieving reusability will require concentrated effort at (meta)data standardization within research communities. Our work to develop 11 community (meta)data reporting formats is a critical step to making Earth and environmental science data more reusable because we emphasize human readability that is compatible with machine readability. We hope that our model of empowering research communities to self-organize and create their own (meta)data reporting formats will enable other communities to undertake these internal data standardization efforts that make their data even more useful beyond the purpose for which they were collected.
Earth and environmental science data are complex, multi-scale, and span diverse research domains such as geology, hydrology, climate, ecology, and biology. At ESS-DIVE, we initiated a community-centric model that engaged domain scientists to develop formats for common Earth science data types. The objective was to create formatting guidelines and templates that would gather the minimum but sufficient metadata or data necessary for data interpretation and reuse.
Each team conducted a review of existing standards (Supplementary Table 1), involving both literature searches and exploring resources from informatics groups (e.g., Research Data Alliance and Earth Science Information Partners) or agencies working with similar data, to identify whether any existing data standards or conventions could be used directly or to inform their reporting format. Based on this review, each team created tabular ‘crosswalks’ (Supplementary Files 1–10) to map related terminology from relevant standards. This process helped identify gaps in existing standards, and determine important elements that had to be present, and variations in terminology used across different standards that required harmonization. For example, some existing standards report date and time under the column name ‘datetime’ while another reports the same information, as ‘ValueDateTime’ (see example of a terminology crosswalk³⁵). Here, we provide a brief narrative of methods for each reporting format with details on existing data standards and other data resources reviewed during reporting format development. For further details on the technical aspects of each reporting format, please refer to ESS-DIVE’s community space on GitHub³⁶ or view the datasets for each reporting format submitted to ESS-DIVE (Supplementary Table 1).
Each team created instructions and (meta)data templates for their reporting formats. The teams piloted the formats within their research groups and communities to ensure the templates were practical and useful for scientists who collect and reuse data (Fig. 2). In total, 247 individuals representing 128 institutions provided input at various stages of the reporting format development process. As the reporting format instructions and templates reached a final stage, they published the “ready-to-use” reporting formats in three locations each with distinct benefits for the end-users: GitHub³⁷, GitBook, and the ESS-DIVE data repository to enable findability and long-term preservation.
Each of the 11 ESS-DIVE (meta)data reporting formats were developed in cross-functional teams that often involved domain scientists, software engineers, and informatics specialists.
The goal for creating the dataset metadata reporting format was to ensure that any dataset submitted to ESS-DIVE would have complete and descriptive metadata to enable its findability and citation upon use. The ESS-DIVE team reviewed machine and human-readable metadata standards including the Ecological Metadata Language⁵² as well as JSON for Linking Data⁵³. The ESS-DIVE metadata reporting format follows existing metadata standards as much as possible (e.g., ‘title’ in Ecological Metadata Language is also ‘title’ for ESS-DIVE’s metadata).
The file-level metadata reporting format was developed for users to provide details about the individual files contained within a dataset. The review of existing standards²⁶ included file-level metadata used across 6 organizations (e.g., USGS, NEON).
The CSV reporting format was developed to provide guidelines for more consistently formatting tabular data²⁷. The intention was to make this a domain agnostic set of guidelines so that anyone who works with tabular data can use the format in their research to make tabular data more interoperable and machine-readable. The team reviewed existing standards and guidelines (Supplementary Table 1) including recommendations from the Environmental Data Initiative (e.g., do not mix data types in a column) and the ORNL DAAC (e.g., indicating missing numeric values with −9999).
The ESS-DIVE Sample ID reporting format²⁸ aligns as much as possible with extensive work on IGSN⁵⁴ with the goal of standardizing sample collection metadata and more efficiently tracking physical samples sent to different collaborators, labs, data systems, etc. This work also reviewed 12 different standards and data resources to provide recommendations for improving interoperability of biological^8,55 and environmental samples¹⁴.
The model data archiving reporting format²⁹ was informed by input from the DOE’s land modeling community and other guidelines from the American Geophysical Union and National Science Foundation Earthcube communities. In developing the guidelines⁴⁹, the goal was to help modelers make decisions about which components of their terrestrial models should be archived in a long-term data repository. The guidelines were developed with input on which model data were most useful to archive, how long they remained useful, and what scientific purpose they would serve.
The goal of developing the location metadata reporting format was to provide generalized guidelines for describing locations used in research. The review of existing standards included metadata templates from specific projects at some of the DOE’s National Labs to understand the different field sampling strategies of large interdisciplinary projects. The review also included known standards and guidelines for recording locations such as Climate and Forecast Conventions⁵⁶, the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata⁵⁷ and the Open Geospatial Consortium⁵⁸.
In addition to the set of 6 cross-domain reporting formats described above, we also developed 5 formats that are tailored to specific data types commonly used in the terrestrial and subsurface ecosystem research community. ESS-DIVE’s goal was to engage Earth and environmental scientists to determine practical reporting formats that data contributors are willing to use while at the same time ensuring a high potential for data reuse.
The reporting format for amplicon abundance table metadata was developed to facilitate consistent reporting of microbiome sample data with the format of these tables following ESS-DIVE’s CSV file guidelines. Required data (e.g., representative sequences) were chosen to support comparisons of abundance tables across studies. The reporting format distinguishes between sequencing metadata and bioinformatic processing metadata for amplicon abundance tables. As much as possible, the team aligned recommendations for sequencing metadata with the existing standards developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium for minimum information about a marker gene sequence and minimum information about any (x) sequence⁵⁵ (Supplementary File 6). In the absence of an existing standard for bioinformatic processing metadata, the reporting format contains a minimal set of fields to capture the data processing steps most relevant for comparing and combining amplicon counts across studies (Supplementary Table 1). The final set of sequencing and bioinformatic metadata fields selected were informed by a community of scientists involved with either the development of microbiome data pipelines or conducting microbiome studies in both field and lab settings.
The team working on this reporting format³² reviewed existing conventions used in plant trait databases, large data collections developed for synthesis papers, and the variable descriptions that are part of standard instrument outputs in order to determine the most suitable variable names to use to report leaf-level gas exchange data. Templates for formatting metadata about the methods and sample materials used in an experiment, as well as details on the instrumentation involved in collecting data were developed through an iterative process of input and review open to all interested stakeholders. The reporting format is designed to be flexible and modular, provides guidelines on the archive of raw and processed data, and seeks to capture experimental metadata needed to interpret and reuse these data types⁴⁷.
To create the soil respiration reporting format, this team reviewed and integrated recommendations from 9 existing guidelines and standards (Supplementary Table 1)³³. The review captured an array of how different standards format their general metadata and data (e.g., formatting date and timestamps) and also accounted for a range of soil-atmosphere gas exchange data types (e.g., GHGs or radiocarbon)⁴⁸.
The goal in creating a reporting format for water-soil-sediment data was to harmonize chemical concentration data that span several measurement types. The review included 15 standards (Supplementary Table 1) for related environmental chemistry measurements including metadata elements from the EPA’s WQX¹⁴ as well as EarthChem⁵⁹. Based on input from the potential ESS user community that included both data collectors, managers, and modelers, we developed a reporting format based on community input³⁴.
This reporting format harmonizes variables common to sonde-based hydrologic monitoring research including water level, temperature, and pH data. The existing standards and/or data sources included in the crosswalk for the hydrologic monitoring reporting format (Supplementary Table 1) were chosen for inclusion given their common use in the scientific community. They aligned generally on the types of hydrologic metadata to record (e.g., information about dates and times as well as information about data collection sites) but had different terminology across each of the resources³⁵. The development of the reporting format included a review of additional data sources and standards beyond those listed in the crosswalk (Supplementary Table 1).
Each data reporting format and all supporting documentation are hosted on our GitHub Community Space³⁶ and archived in the ESS-DIVE data repository^{25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35}. The supplementary information for this manuscript is also archived in ESS-DIVE^{60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111,112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129,130,131,132,133,134,135,136,137,138,139,140,141,142,143,144,145,146,147}.
We have made code available which enables file-level metadata extraction⁵¹ for files that adhere to the reporting format.
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Robert Crystal-Ornelas, Charuleka Varadharajan, Dylan O’Ryan, Madison Burrus, Shreyas Cholia, Joan Damerow, Valerie C. Hendrix, Zarine Kakalia, Fianna O’Brien, Emily Robles, Maegen Simmonds, Karen Whitenack, and Deborah A. Agarwal were funded through the ESS-DIVE repository by the U.S. DOE’s Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231. Kim S. Ely and Alistair Rogers were supported through the US Department of Energy contract number DE-SC0012704 to Brookhaven National Laboratory. Michael Crow, Susan Heinz, Terri Velliquette, and Jessica N. Welch were supported through the US Department of Energy contract number DE-AC05-1008 00OR22725 to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We acknowledge the work of Diana Swantek in producing the Fig. 2 illustration. Reporting format development was supported by through the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the Department of Energy, Office of Science.
Maegen Simmonds
Present address: Pivot Bio, 2910 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA, 94710, USA
Robert Crystal-Ornelas
Present address: Github, San Francisco, CA, 94107, USA
Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
Robert Crystal-Ornelas, Charuleka Varadharajan, Dylan O’Ryan, Madison Burrus, Joan Damerow, Zarine Kakalia, Emily Robles, Maegen Simmonds & Karen Whitenack
Environmental Studies Department, California State University, Sacramento, 6000 Jed Smith Dr, Sacramento, CA, 95819, USA
Dylan O’Ryan
Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, 60439, USA
Kathleen Beilsmith & Pamela Weisenhorn
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland–College Park, College Park, MD, 20740, USA
Benjamin Bond-Lamberty & Stephanie C. Pennington
Environmental Geochemistry Group, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA
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Scientific Data Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
Shreyas Cholia, Danielle S. Christianson, Valerie C. Hendrix, Fianna O’Brien & Deborah A. Agarwal
Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 37830, USA
Michael Crow, Susan L. Heinz, Terri Velliquette & Jessica Nicole Welch
Environmental and Climate Sciences Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, 11973, USA
Kim S. Ely & Alistair Rogers
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, 99354, USA
Amy E. Goldman
Integrated Life Sciences, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, 23284, USA
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Conceptualization: D.A.A., C.V., Data curation: R.C.O., C.V., D.O., K.B., B.B.L., K.B., M.C., J.D., K.S.E., A.E.G., S.L.H., K.M., S.C.P., A.R., M.S., T.V., P.W., J.N.W., D.A.A., Funding Acquisition: D.A.A., C.V., Methodology: D.A.A., C.V., R.C.O., J.E.D., K.B., B.B.L., K.B., M.C., J.D., K.S.E., A.E.G., S.L.H., K.M., S.C.P., A.R., M.S., T.V., P.W., J.N.W. Project Administration: D.A.A., K.W. Resources: D.A.A. Software: M.C. Supervision: D.A.A., C.V. Visualization: R.C.O., C.V. Writing – original draft: R.C.O., C.V., J.E.D. Writing – review and editing: R.C.O., C.V., D.O., K.B., B.B.L., K.B., M.B., S.C., D.S.C., M.C., J.D., K.S.E., A.E.G., S.L.H., V.C.H., Z.K., K.M., F.O., S.C.P., E.R., A.R., M.S., T.V., P.W., J.W.N., K.W., D.A.A.
Correspondence to Charuleka Varadharajan.
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Quality management systems give enterprise customers the tools to methodically meet compliance requirements and provide quality services to customers without scrambling between multiple platforms. With QMS software, enterprises are able to manage all their quality management-based compliance documentation in a single solution. They can prepare for audits and organize supplier information. 
Handling customer feedback and complaints also plays a role in quality management and assurance. To produce a product that customers love and benefit from, enterprises often need to collaborate with them in the product design and change process.
Table of Contents
A quality management system is a control center for enterprise processes that helps organizations meet industry expectations and standards, with the purpose of producing goods and services that are satisfactory to both customers and the industry. Quality management is most frequently used by industries that need to produce goods that must meet a certain standard. Examples include:
Quality management systems help businesses meet their regulatory requirements by breaking down each step of the compliance process and recording the level of completion for those steps. They also help organizations collaborate with their customers to find an acceptable level of quality in goods and services through practices like reviewing and approving product designs and providing feedback. 
Most— if not all— companies that use quality management systems or software have at least one regulatory standard to which they must adhere. Some of the most common include:
Some standards, including ISO 9001 and 27001, have certifications that businesses can earn. These certifications might help raise a customer’s confidence in the company or even be one of the conditions on which a business agreement rests
Read more on TechnologyAdvice: 3 Ways to Plan Quality Management in Projects
Quality management system software brings all procedural and regulatory requirements together so that both large and small enterprises can manage them in a single digital platform.
Businesses are able to prepare for audits, organize supplier information, and have the required documentation ready. Preparing for enterprise audits without a central digital platform can be a messy and painstaking process, but a QMS solution brings all necessary documentation into one interface. 
QMS software alerts employees when they need to complete a compliance task and allows businesses to manage all their quality management-based compliance documentation in a single solution. It provides a storage location for documents that outline quality management and quality assurance processes. 
QMS solutions also provide training or support to businesses as they use the platform, like informative videos, webinars, or technical fixes or improvements.
Also read: How Organizations Commit to Compliance 
Qualio is a management tool for small to medium businesses in the life sciences industry, specifically biotech, medical device, and clinical research companies. To keep companies’ audits easier and more organized, Qualio provides its customers with reports, including an assigned approver and the status of the report, and document filters. Qualio offers a checklist to help businesses streamline compliance with 21 CFR Part 11, so that organizations using digital signatures can track their adherence to the regulation. 
Qualio provides supplier and audit management and change control features, so pharmaceutical businesses can have better control over their drugs and supplies and meet expectations from auditors. 
Qualio serves the contract research industry, too: it reveals the percentage of progress made on training and audit processes. It also shows the status of every event assigned to that training task. For contract researchers, Qualio also allows users to create workflows that determine document management, like reviewing or retiring documents. 
For corrective and preventative action (CAPA) and non-conformance management, Qualio has automated workflows for companies to record and manage incidents and events throughout the event lifecycle. It shows what percentage of events have been resolved, how many steps have been completed to resolve each event, and the risk level for each event. 
Qualio+ is an add-on to the Qualio plan that allows companies to collaborate with quality assurance experts. Qualio+ also includes templates and documents for meeting ISO and FDA regulations.
Also read: Best Change Management Tools 
QT9 is a quality management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for businesses in manufacturing and other production-based industries, such as aerospace, food, and pharmaceuticals. Its many modules work together rather than being siloed, stand-alone applications. QT9 has both supplier and customer modules, allowing enterprises to evaluate their suppliers’ regulatory compliance and receive services and product feedback from clients.
The calibration management module allows businesses to create a schedule for calibrating each piece of equipment; when a piece of equipment needs to be calibrated, QT9 sends email reminders. This module helps manufacturing firms comply with ISO 45001, a safety standard that includes equipment calibration. 
QT9’s engineering change order software, also known as engineering change request (ECR) or engineering change notice (ECN), allows businesses to manage their product design changes, such as sending email alerts when a design is edited or receiving input from clients. Engineering admins can assign approvers and verify or reject engineering change requests (ECRs). QT9 also gives companies a web portal where their customers can sign ECRs. Approvals in QT9 are done through electronic signatures.  
QT9 also has a document control module, which received praise from customers—they found that the module streamlined their documentation and made content easy to search. QT9 users are able to remotely edit documents and share them with suppliers and clients.  
QT9’s ERP software sets it apart from other QMS tools. For businesses that want their quality management processes and resource data in the same platform, the ERP solution includes bill of materials software that helps businesses track all items needed for a product. It also allows them to store multiple revised versions of products in the system.
Also read: Best ERP Systems
Greenlight Guru is a quality management solution specifically tailored for businesses in the medical field. Medical organizations use Greenlight Guru to achieve ISO 13485 certification, a process that reviews whether a company’s medical devices meet the quality standards set by ISO. Greenlight Guru also provides resources, like a webinar covering ISO standard changes or medical device product deployment guides, to enterprises.
The design control software within the QMS solution includes digital design reviews to help businesses plan product reviews. Additionally, the closed-loop traceability feature (also known as closed-loop quality management) improves visualization for companies that need to quickly provide documents to auditors or track the impact of changes.
Greenlight Guru is designed for businesses in the medical device industry, particularly smaller firms. For organizations wanting to use their QMS dually as a documentation tool, though, Greenlight Guru may not be the right choice. One of the major categories of complaints from customers was about the tool’s document management features. Users had trouble uploading documents from other applications and using the internal search feature to easily locate documents.
Greenlight Guru receives consistently high praise from users for its customer support team. Each business has the option to meet regularly with “gurus” for one-hour sessions to receive coaching, prepare for audits, or discuss risk management. 
ComplianceQuest is cloud-based QMS, environmental health and safety, and compliance management software built on Salesforce’s platform. It has a wide range of features that are useful for companies in many industries. Reviewers came from organizations in IT, apparel, warehousing, logistics, and transportation, to name only a few.  
A unique feature of ComplianceQuest is its focus on sustainability and environmental health. The environment management solution helps businesses comply with EPA and other national regulatory standards. The solution also works with ComplianceQuest’s QMS software so companies can manage sustainability-related documentation and inspections. 
ComplianceQuest also offers clinical trial management for medical and research companies. Features include patient recruitment, with campaigns and subject enrollment, and an investigator portal, which allows people participating in clinical studies to collaborate. 
Because ComplianceQuest sits atop the Salesforce platform, businesses that already use Salesforce may find it easier to implement than companies that don’t use it, since they’re already familiar with the cloud-based Salesforce web application. Although ComplianceQuest markets its software as clinical, health and safety, and quality management-focused, it also meets the compliance and audit management needs of businesses in many different industries. 
ComplianceQuest can even serve as a risk management tool. It has a risk management module and includes features like risk assessments, which can analyze the risks in QMS features like CAPAs and nonconformances. ComplianceQuest has an audit management module as well, which allows businesses to schedule all their audits and view past audit reports. For small and mid-sized organizations that want QMS software with risk management included, ComplianceQuest offers an interconnected suite. 
Also read: Best Risk Management Software
MasterControl is a quality management, manufacturing, and regulatory compliance platform. Its manufacturing solution is thorough, offering device history records and equipment calibration. Variant management software allows enterprises to track product variations; if a parent product is changed, the product variants underneath it change accordingly. 
The change control solution reveals relationships between changes and other parts of the business and tracks changes that users have made. MasterControl’s change solution includes engineering change management for safety concerns and missing parts. 
MasterControl’s document management solution helps businesses be 21 CFR Part 11 compliant by storing all documents and time-stamping them for audit purposes. External users, such as customers that need to view and approve a plan, can also receive access to a document.
MasterControl’s risk management software, part of the quality management solution, permits risk assessments throughout the rest of the platform. It also has a risk management database to store risk data, that the enterprise can analyze and use to handle threats. 
The supplier solution also includes vendor management, which is an important component of risk management. MasterControl’s vendor management software stores supplier deviation records and bills of materials. 
MasterControl’s suite of tools can serve smaller organizations that want to purchase limited software or large enterprises that want multiple advanced solutions that work together. 
Consider whether your business has sufficient time and personnel to take time to implement it. Some customers found the navigation difficult or said that learning MasterControl’s software had a learning curve. 
Quality management systems often include the following features:
If you’re planning to purchase quality management system software, consider the following things. 
Quality management systems typically cater to similar industries, but not all QMS software has the same ideal customer. If you’re a large manufacturer and need specific built-in features like engineering change requests, look for solutions that have a manufacturing focus. 
QMS software differs in ease of implementation. If you have a large team that can dedicate itself to a deployment process, implementing a solution-heavy platform with lots of modules (like MasterControl or ComplianceQuest) may be more doable for your business. 
Look at vendor reviews to discern how responsive their customer support teams are, and determine how important that is to your business, especially depending on the size of your team.
Some QMS vendors support more regulations than ISO or FDA. Choose a quality management system depending on which regulatory standards your business must meet. 
Enterprise quality management software is a powerful tool for organizing your business’s approach to regulatory compliance, managing supplier relationships, and maintaining customer trust. Carefully choosing a QMS solution is worthwhile for companies that want to use the software for many years and business transitions to come.
Read next: Top Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) Tools
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Up to $100 Off Award Winning Scanners During Select Dates in November and December
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., Nov. 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Stumped on what to gift this year? Consider the ever-practical gift of organization for the DIY creative, busy family member and busy professional on your list.  To help make gift giving easier, Epson is lowering prices across its most popular photo, receipt, and document scanners this holiday season. The Epson FastFoto^® FF-680W, RapidReceipt^® RR-600W, WorkForce^® ES-50, and WorkForce ES-580W will be available to consumers at up to $100 off during select dates, starting Nov. 6, and continuing through the end of the year, at select retail locations.¹
“From family photos and kid’s artwork to important documents and decluttering, a little creative organization helps bring a sense of space and order to your life,” said Dan McMillen, product manager, retail scanners, Epson America. “This year, Epson has a scanner to meet just about any digitizing and organizing need at great holiday prices to help loved one’s tackle projects for years to come. It’s truly a practical gift that keeps on giving.”
In addition to shopping for gifts and making holiday plans, as we near the end of the year, many of us are making plans for getting organized over the coming year. And New Year’s Resolutions, such as organizing the office paperwork, help families tackle the daunting but necessary tasks. Epson is offering some gift ideas (at great holiday prices) to help loved ones not only get organized, but easily stay organized all year.   
Helping with this year’s shopping list, Epson is offering holiday discount pricing across some of its most popular scanner models beginning Sunday, Nov. 6, available through the Epson e-store and select retailers and e-tailers⁶:
Epson is a global technology leader whose philosophy of efficient, compact and precise innovation enriches lives and helps create a better world. The company is focused on solving societal issues through innovations in home and office printing, commercial and industrial printing, manufacturing, visual and lifestyle. Epson’s goal is to become carbon negative and eliminate use of exhaustible underground resources such as oil and metal by 2050.
Led by the Japan-based Seiko Epson Corporation, the worldwide Epson Group generates annual sales of around JPY 1 trillion. global.epson.com/
Epson America, Inc., based in Los Alamitos, Calif., is Epson’s regional headquarters for the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. To learn more about Epson, please visit: epson.com. You may also connect with Epson America on Facebook (facebook.com/Epson), Twitter (twitter.com/EpsonAmerica), YouTube (youtube.com/epsonamerica), and Instagram (instagram.com/EpsonAmerica).
¹From to Nov. 6, 2022, to Jan. 22, 2023 receive up to $30 off the WorkForce ES-50, up to $100 off the WorkForce ES-580W, up to $100 off the RapidReceipt RR-600W, and up to $100 off the FastFoto FF-680W, available at select retailers. Prices are subject to change.
² Based on average speed from start of scan to end of feeding, scanning thirty-six 4″ x 6″ photos at 300 dpi in landscape orientation. Results may vary based on processor speed, memory, and operating system of the connected computer.
³ Requires Epson FastFoto App download (data usage fees may apply), compatible mobile device, and a FastFoto FF-680W (sold separately).
⁴ At 300 dpi, based on 8.5″ x 11″, 1-sheet scan speed.
⁵ Wirelessly scan to smartphones or tablets (Android™/iOS^® devices) via the Epson Smart Panel^® App; wirelessly scan to the cloud, PCs or Macs with Epson ScanSmart Software installed on the connected Windows PC or Mac.
⁶ Start date for deals will vary across the range of retailers and e-tailers.
EPSON, FastFoto, RapidReceipt, Epson ScanSmart, Epson Smart Panel, and WorkForce, are registered trademarks and EPSON Exceed Your Vision is a registered logomark of Seiko Epson Corporation. Excel and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and brand names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Epson disclaims any and all rights in these marks. Copyright 2022 Epson America, Inc.
SOURCE Epson America, Inc.
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