Master and Transactional Data Management

Mylan’s 483 observation states that changes were being made to a LIMS system outside of the site’s change control process.

This should obviously be read in light of data integrity requirements. And it looks like in this case there was no way to produce a list of changes, which is a big audit trail no-no.

It’s also an area where I’ve seen a lot of folks make miss-steps, and frankly, I’m not sure I’ve always got it right.

There is a real tendency to look at the use of our enterprise systems and want all actions and approvals to happen within the system. This makes sense, we want to reduce our touch points, but there are some important items to consider before moving ahead with that approach.

Changes control is about assessing, handling and releasing the change. Most importantly it is in light the validated and regulatory impact. It serves disposition. As such, it is a good thing to streamline our changes into one system. To ensure every change gets assessed equally, and then gets the right level of handling it needs, and has a proper release.

Allowing a computer system to balkanize your changes, in the end, doesn’t really simplify. And in this day of master data management, of heavily aligned and talking systems, to be nimble requires us to know with a high degree of certainty that when we apply a change we are applying it thoroughly.

The day of separated computer systems is long over. It is important that our change management system takes that into account and offers single-stop shopping.