Overview

Pilgrim provides a fully web-based suite of Enterprise Risk, Compliance & Quality Management (ERCQM) solutions. Pilgrim's solutions help regulated companies, general manufacturing, and other organizations enhance quality, manage compliance, enhance customer and supplier relationships, and improve profitability.

Built on Microsoft^® .NET^® technology, Pilgrim's ERCQM architecture creates a powerful compliance and quality management platform that enables multiple sites, organizations, customers, and suppliers to effectively coordinate improvement activities and share critical information.  It also enables aggregated reporting and analysis. Information and transactions are made available to mobile and desktop devices through a secure connection.

Pilgrim's solutions are highly scalable to support your expanding enterprise. A true global solution, Pilgrim’s applications are multi-language capable and include universal date/time and culture-sensitive options. The combination of XML and Web Services provides a reliable application and data integration methodology across the entire enterprise.

Pilgrim’s leading-edge technology provides the foundation for implementing best practices into your organization through:

Collaboration – Allow every component of your organization’s value chain to readily provide key information to users, providing a tighter eco-system for proactive decision-making.

Communication – Effectively extract critical data and communicate in real-time to all users, while the system manages the automation and triggers for alerts and workflow activation.

Integration – Leverage your existing IT investments by streamlining all your systems’ critical quality events and records via Pilgrim’s integration framework to ensure closed-loop compliance.

Organization – Easily enable administrators to quickly and effectively manage and organize company requirements, tailored to specific departmental needs or multi-site global deployments.

Security – Multi-organizational, role-based security and powerful password authentication ensure that only authorized users can access your data, while ensuring compliance with electronic record security requirements.

 

"In addition to providing automated processes that will support our quality management initiatives, Pilgrim’s

solution also provides the scalability to easily integrate additional modules and increase the number of users."

Architecture

Organizations are embracing global risk, compliance and quality management as a strategic enterprise solution critical to improving their operational efficiencies, to gaining competitive advantage, and to driving their success. Some organizations that implement risk management, compliance and quality in one or more departments or sites, realize significant gains in efficiency and competitive advantage, and decide to deploy across all their business operations. Others start with the intention of implementing an end-to-end global solution. In either case, a system’s architecture and scalability – how well it performs in the face of increasing processing demands – is an important factor to consider when choosing and implementing a global compliance and quality solution.

Pilgrim’s solution is built on Microsoft .NET technology and supports an open architecture. The application has been designed for wide area network use and has been tested and optimized for rapid response times and architected for scalability.  Pilgrim’s solutions can be deployed in different configurations such as clustering and backup servers to support high availability.

Architecture Components

• User Interface: The junction between a user and an application. Pilgrim’s solution user interface provides a set of menus and links through which the user communicates with the application.

• Business (Biz) Layer: The layer between the interface and the database. This layer handles the business logic, notifications and calculations of the application.

• Data Layer: The layer located between the biz layer and the database is a gateway between the biz layer and the database. Data is taken from the database and transferred through the data layer to the biz layer, where logic is applied, and vice versa.

System Components

Below are definitions of the basic components that comprise Pilgrim’s solution, and the high- level overview of how Pilgrim’s internal architecture interacts with external systems.

Active Directory – Pilgrim leverages Microsoft’s Active Directory infrastructure to control access to its applications in conjunction with its Roles and Rights Manager.

Audit Trail – Pilgrim’s solution has a robust traceability mechanism to trace all changes made to data within each module. All changes are stamped with the name of the originator and the time and date of the change. Each field level change creates an individual entry in the Audit Trail; therefore, the previously recorded change information is retained. Data can be easily viewed or output in a report.

Business Application Designer (SmartStudio^™) – SmartStudio^™ is a collection of graphical user interface tools that enables administrators to tailor existing Pilgrim applications or create new compliance-centric applications to meet user’s specific business needs.

Crystal Report Server – Pilgrim provides powerful, customizable reporting capabilities utilizing Crystal Reports.

Database Management - Pilgrim’s solution is supported by either an Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) database. The application also supports multi-byte character sets in Oracle or MSSQL Unicode database. Organizations can have a single instance of the Pilgrim application with a “Unicode” database that allows users to enter/view/search and report on multi-byte languages such as Kanji, Chinese and Korean.

External Data Sources – Pilgrim application forms can be configured to look up and retrieve data external to the Pilgrim database by leveraging ODBC connectivity and web services.

Integration – Pilgrim provides several integration methods to seamlessly share data between Pilgrim’s solution and a customer’s existing applications such as ERP, MES, LIMS, CRM, PLM systems, etc. to track and manage all of your quality events.

Internet Information Services (IIS) – Pilgrim’s solution is deployed utilizing Microsoft’s IIS web server platform.

License Manager – The License Manager is Pilgrim’s user license control for access to the application.

Schema Definition – Schemas define the table and view information for Pilgrim’s applications. Schemas are stored in the database in XML format.

SmartComm^™ – SmartComm^™ manages email notifications, PDF renderings and workflow escalations.

SmartInsight^™ – SmartInsight^™ is a user-friendly reporting capability that provides business users the ability to generate specific custom queries and chart the results in a structured grid format. SmartInsight gives you the ability to create new log reports with runtime parameters, cross-tabs, embedded graphics and the ability to share these reports with other users. You can export the reports into PDF, Word, Excel and other popular formats.

SmartPulse^™ – SmartPulse^™ is a user-friendly Business Intelligence (BI) tool with pre-built Pilgrim solution data cubes that are populated with Pilgrim application transactional data. This provides users the ability to quickly analyze data and provides an environment for rapid decision-making.

Web Services Integration Kit^™ – Pilgrim’s Web Services Integration Kit^™ provides the connectivity between third-party applications and Pilgrim applications. The kit includes pre-built web services to synchronize your organization’s key system information.

Foundation

Pilgrim Software's solution is built on a robust foundation that provides a rich framework of functionality and also a set of tools and utilities to easily tailor, configure and manage the solution, making it easier for administrators to create the environment for their end-users.

	Audit Trail Electronic Signature   Security   Office Integration   Dashboard   Query/Advanced Search   Export/Import   Notification/Alerts   Thresholds   Escalation   Triggers/Activation   Calculations   PDF Rendition   On-Line Help   Wizards   Application Option Manager   Application Design Manager   Data Manager   Forms Manager   Language Manager   List Manager   Migration Manager   Org Manager

Operating Environment

Pilgrim’s SmartSolve^®version 9 supports the following operating environment: (For more information, please contact a Pilgrim representative.)

Framework:  .NET 3.5

Server:  Microsoft Windows 2003, 2008*

Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Oracle 10g*

Web Server: Microsoft IIS 6.0, 7.0, 7.5*

Client Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

LDAP: Microsoft Active Directory LDAP 3.0

Mail Protocol: SMTP

Protocols: http and https

Network Protocol: TCP/IP

PLUS support for Microsoft Office 2007 and Acrobat Reader 9.

*Note: Can be operated in a virtual host server environment using VMware.

The application is 100% Microsoft .NET and supports the tools that can monitor .NET applications. Pilgrim’s solution leverages TCP/IP protocols which can be used with CMOT (CMIP over TCP/IP). In addition, Pilgrim’s messaging and notification server, SmartComm^™, can be run as a Microsoft Windows Service providing additional levels of system management.

Global Platform

Enterprise Deployment

Pilgrim’s solution has been developed as a true enterprise level collaborative Risk, Compliance and Quality Management platform that enables multiple sites, customers and suppliers to effectively coordinate improvement activities and share critical information in a standardized, consistent and secure manner.

Designed with a centralized database structure, the system uses logical partitioning to separate the data within the database. The system provides an ‘Organization’ capability which allows the customer to define their corporate and local sites. Each of the organizations may then have their own departments.

Using different built-in functionality and security, users such as suppliers, can be restricted to viewing information which is pertinent only to them.

Global Support

Whether you are with a smaller company serving a multilingual customer base, or larger enterprise with workers across the globe, Pilgrim Software’s pre-developed SmartSolve Language Packs^™ provide a cost-effective way to deliver the optimal user experience regardless of location or local language.  The Language Packs standardize support for users who create, edit and manage data in different languages across an organization by converting Pilgrim’s application into the company’s primary language or other language of choice.

• Pilgrim’s multi-language support spans system elements such as screens, menus, reports, messages, numeric formats and even transactions.

• At login, users can choose the language in which they want to operate. All transactions are stored in a language-independent format.

• Administrators can create documents, including audit reports, in the language of their customers and vendors.

• Customers can perform additional translation to Pilgrim’s out-of-the-box Best Practices configuration of the chosen language, if they have proprietary terminology that better suits their standard operational language.

Benefits

Benefits

• Built on industry-leading Microsoft .NET and XML Technology and leading relational databases
• Multi-tiered System (User Interface Layer, Business Logic Layer and Data Layer)
• Portal page provides users with a single entry page with personalized reports, tasks and documents
  
• Fully Web-based with no client-side code to ensure fast deployment, global access, easy server-level validation and a low cost of ownership
• Highly scalable solution capable of meeting your enterprise’s expanding needs including leading-edge tools to help in migration and managing centralized user authentication
• Multi-organizational, role-based security ensures that only authorized users have access to your corporate data
• Provides multi-language capabilities, including double-byte character support (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.), universal date/time and culture sensitive options for global operations
• Leverages Connectors, Adapters and Web Services to integrate with cornerstone applications such as PDM, ERP, MES, CRM, SCM and HR to ensure bi-directional data integrity
• Highly configurable to meet a wide variety of business needs through 100% web-based design tools
• Extensible to allow tailoring to the user interface, creating new process automation applications and integration with other business systems 
• Delivered in on-site perpetual license installations or a choice of Pilgrim's On-Demand (SaaS) solution

Resources

Data Sheets

• Gain Complete Report Flexibility with SmartInsight^™
• SmartPulse^™ - Business Intelligence
• SmartSolve^® Synchronization Agent (SSA^™)
• Document Extraction Utility (DEU^™)
• Integrated Content Management - Document Synchronization Agent (ICM-DSA^™)
• SmartSolve^® Integration Web Services Kit^™
• Pilgrim On Demand (Software as a Service)

White Papers

• Business Analytics & Intelligence
• Pilgrim On Demand

Demo

• Analytics & Business Intelligence