Core Best Practices

PaxPro Core Best Practices

At the heart of PaxPro is a set of time-tested best practices: all proven to reduce rework, improve cycle times — often dramatically- enhance productivity and contain or even eliminate certain costs. These best practices are winning strategies from within the MeadWestvaco organization as well as from hundreds of other customer companies across the globe. As a key element of brand and packaging asset management, these core best practices help you achieve even greater excellence in your branding and packaging efforts.

Routing and Approvals

PaxPro contains powerful and easy-to-use routing and approval templates and forms. Using one or more of these intuitive tools, you can easily execute, monitor, and coordinate the approvals of over 400 types of documents — from the most graphic intensive to the simplest MS Word document.

Routes are role-based; approvers see only what they need to, in the order in which their comments are needed. Roles are fully customizable. Documents are contained within a central repository, available with just an internet connection and a browser. Version control is guaranteed. Digital signatures to approve documents are fully compliant with 21 CFR Part 11.

You can also assign specific approvers by name, by job function or division. Documents can be approved in any order, all selected by you or dictated by your company's standard operating procedures. It's easy and automated.

Search

With the number of projects rising, and brand equity ever more difficult to achieve, brand and packaging professionals need fast access to precise, relevant data. PaxPro search functions are more robust than most any you will find. The Search feature streamlines access to all the files in PaxPro, making finding what you need quick and easy.

You may search any of the standard attributes of files provided by the system, by your own custom attributes or by any text within Office documents. Keyword searches by project asset attributes like Description, Owner, Name, Originator or Version, provide fast results as well. The PaxPro Advanced Search function provides an even more precise match with more filtering choices based on attributes and custom attributes. Some examples:

Keyword search - search for text across any attribute
Full text search - search for text within documents
Search results screen - thumbnail and detailed views
Search within results - progressively narrow search results by running searches against smaller results sets
Saved searches - save commonly used searches for easy reuse

You may also add custom attributes to documents, workspaces, and projects and then search on them as well — e.g., search by product line, brand, SKU, part numbers, customers, etc.

Visual Cues

You may upload visual cues or scaled down pictures of assets called "thumbnails," into a workspace for quick reference. PaxPro also creates an automatic thumbnail for most file types.

Thumbnails enable quick identification of files in searches and eliminate the need to sort through clutter. This feature supports dozens of file formats and can save a project team hours or days in transmission of hard copies and/or CDs. PaxPro hosted architecture also saves server space by housing large graphical files remotely.

Automated Proofreading

In partnership with GlobalVision Inc., and their Docu-Proof C3 automated proofreading software, you can eliminate copy and artwork related errors, decrease approval times, increase process efficiencies, and reduce costs. You can compare text in virtually any language. Even compare unlike files (graphic vs. word files). Quickly and easily find changes in fonts, sizes, deletions, inserts, spelling, and location. You can even spell check PDFs!

Custom Attributes

PaxPro Custom Attributes allow you to define optional characteristics associated with files, projects, workspaces or calendars. Custom Attributes, and their allowable values, which can only be implemented by the PaxPro Administrator, become part of a company's data model and cannot be changed by individual users. However, users can select from predetermined allowable values for active custom attribute fields, or enter their own values.

Reporting

You have instant, real time visibility into the status of the reviews, approvals and projects in PaxPro via executive-level dashboards and detailed reporting capabilities.

A PaxPro Executive Dashboard gives a graphical representation of projects and routes in progress. Each user can customize the dashboard to fit his/her needs such as selecting and customizing a specific report from the drop-down menu, or choosing the All Reports link for a list of pre-defined reports. The user is able to click a chart in the dashboard to get more individualized and detailed reports.

You can rely on real-time data to make informed decisions and to improve business performance. Views are easily customized to your preference.

History

PaxPro automatically maintains a complete history of all assets and actions taken against those assets. All versions are maintained in the history archive. The history function, along with the audit feature, is pivotal to meeting regulatory compliance. With the proper rights, you are able to see and compare any previous version of an asset and all the associated annotations, discussions, actions, taken against it.

PaxPro offers two kinds of reporting modules:

Basic Report
Advanced Report

The PaxPro Basic Report Module

This module creates basic data reports based on parameters that exist as part of normal PaxPro usage. This module reports on items such as late route tasks, project tasks in process, project tasks in review, etc. These basic reports do not report on customer data but rather on parameters that are created as a by-product of normal PaxPro usage. These data reports are exportable to csv format so you can easily use a program such as MS Excel to create additional reports, charts, graphs, etc.

The PaxPro Advanced Report Module

The optional PaxPro Advanced Report Module provides reporting on the underlying data and metadata about customer assets, etc. For example, you can create a report listing all assets that contain a particular set of metadata. This might be something like "show me a report of all assets where PET is used as a substrate."

There are two kinds of reports within the PaxPro Advanced Report Module: On Demand Reports and Canned Reports.

On Demand Reports

On Demand reports are created by you or your PaxPro users and provide data reports on items about your own data. Users would create these reports, on-the-fly, as they need the data. They can save these reports to be run again at a later date. These data reports are exportable to csv format so a customer could use a program such as Excel to create additional reports, charts, graphs, etc.

Canned Reports

Canned reports are created by Paxonix Solutions Engineers and are designed to be reports that you use on a consistent basis. For example, a canned report might be called the "Quarterly Report by Brand" and would be run each quarter as a management reporting tool for brand managers. These reports are much richer in content and would contain various charts, graphs and are customized specifically for your needs.

Audit

Audit is a key enabler of a regulatory compliant environment within PaxPro. When updating the status of tasks, the actual finish date is not updated until the task is set to complete. If the task needs to be reviewed by a manager, users leave the status at review; or set the task to complete. A task not set to complete will have an adverse affect on slippage calculations and reporting in general.

Lifecycle Management

PaxPro incorporates all the best practices in the lifecycle management of brand and packaging assets. The thorough feature set ensures streamlined processes and checks and balances for every stage through which each and every asset passes during its lifetime.

Role-based Security

Paxonix Solution Engineers partner with your designated PaxPro administration-level users to define access parameters and user roles for each engagement. From customizing user preferences to extending a task or project deadline, each PaxPro function is assigned parameters and degrees of permission to ensure only those users, whether in-house or a supplier or partner, can access files in a pre-defined, well-understood and appropriate manner.

Artwork re-purposing

Your company will save significant time and money by replicating the successful, and abandoning the unsuccessful, aspects of past projects. PaxPro lets teams begin a new project by copying a past project and then customizing its workflow and parameters to meet the needs of a new initiative. This re-purposing leverages best practices to save precious time in planning thus speeding time to market.

Complex File Support

PaxPro supports more than 400 commonly-used file formats from the marketing, packaging and design industries. These include: Microsoft Office applications, text, graphics, CAD/Line-Art, InDesign, Quark and Extensible languages, among numerous others.

21 CFR Part 11 and Sarbanes Oxley compliance

Compliance takes a staggering array of forms — from federal/state regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, waste recycling acts and 21 CFR Part 11, to a company's own operational initiatives like Six Sigma or other quality/manufacturability standards. Compliance to any or all of these efforts, requires ongoing monitoring across the entire product lifecycle.

PaxPro contains all the controls - from audit and history trails - to being repeatedly system validated to the most stringent FDA requirements - to ensure regulatory compliance. It complies fully with FDA Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 11: Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures.