An ACE User’s Favorite Features

PSC Software recently had a chance to sit down with one of our ACE users to see what their favorite functions of ACE are. Here are the top five functions that they used the most in their day-to-day work in life sciences, along with why the functions are useful and how they can help other users.

User’s Top 5 Features

1) “I like being able to find records quickly or a group of records using filters in the Workspace.”

All controlled documents are stored in the ACE Platform as records. ACE User can access Advanced Search in the Workspace with data and metadata filters like date ranges, record types, custom fields, etc., to narrow results and retrieve information quickly.

Why it’s useful in our users:
Whether it’s everyday work or during periodic inspections, users are frequently asked to follow or produce specific documentation such as updated SOPs, evidence of training completion, change controls, or details of a deviation/CAPA. Strong filtering in the ACE Workspace reduces time spent hunting documents and lowers the risk of sharing the wrong version or incomplete evidence. This is especially important when auditors ask for groups of records such all deviations in a date range or all trainings done by an individual. The efficiency of the ACE Platform documentation makes it easy to precisely track down records and avoid request overload.

2) “Being able to create dashboards that allow you to track/find things and also do investigations or analytics; by far the feature I use the most”

With ACE Analytics, users can build custom dashboards, create visualizations and reports without manually searching and digging for information, and drill down data to perform investigations.

Why it’s useful in regulated industries:
Regulated teams need visibility and trending, especially for quality events. Oversight of what’s overdue, what’s recurring, where risk is increasing, and whether remediation is working is vital to maintain efficiency and quality. ACE dashboards support proactive management and can be used to track a multitude of activities including CAPA progression, deviation volume, training compliance, inspection request status, and more. This eliminated delayed time-to-insight as patterns and trends can be spotted in real time to trigger investigations when needed.

3) “ACE generates a full configuration specification for workflows which helps a lot during the validation process as there is no need to manually document or take screenshots.”

When creating and validating workflows in ACE, configuration specifications are generated through ACE to describe how the application is configured to perform workflow functions.

Why it’s useful in regulated industries:
Validation of workflows in ACE hinges on documented evidence of intended use and configured behavior. Automatically generating a configuration specification reduces manual documentation burden and reduces human error from screenshot-based documentation, while giving QA and CSV teams a consistent record for review and approval as a formal step of validation.

4) “Being able to quickly and easily share documents with others through the Inspection Portal is great. No need to find paper documents or export a bunch of documents.”

The Inspector Portal available in ACE Inspection is a secure, worldwide-accessible portal where inspectors can access and review inspection-related documentation in real time, including viewing shared files directly in the portal.

Why it’s useful in regulated industries:
When inspections are manually managed, issues like too many emails, uncontrolled file transfers, unclear access boundaries, and slow request turnaround often pop up. A portal model supports controlled sharing and reduces the chaos of exporting and emailing large batches of evidence. Once inspectors enter their portals, documents need only be shared through ACE Inspection for them to securely access.

5) “Analytics reports allow a user to do additional reports or investigations into training and record information.”

Advanced reporting lets users go beyond operational search for their data. With an integrated platform like ACE, individual modules complement one another to perform functions together that they can’t provide separately. In this case, ACE Analytics and ACE LMS work together to analyze data and metadata.

Why it’s useful in regulated industries:
Simple workspace filtering is great for finding a record or a set of records, but complex queries for topics like training compliance often require aggregation (by role/site/curriculum/version), trend analysis (e.g., activities most overdue or drivers of retraining), and evidence packaging (what changed, who retrained, completion history). That’s where analytics-style reporting becomes essential, especially because training is a frequent inspection target and teams need rapid, audit-ready outputs. By having the analytics module directly integrated with the learning management module, generated reports are not only detailed but can be used to direct changers training to better improve compliance.

What all of these comments say about ACE

These comments are indicative that the “favorite” ACE functions of our users aren’t niche power-user tricks, but rather the day-to-day tools that build the backbone of how regulated teams get work done. These features help to pull the right records fast, keep daily priorities visible, and spot trends and support investigations beyond the basics.  Just as importantly, the same theme shows up in inspection readiness: users value being able to securely share exactly what’s needed through a portal instead of exporting files, and they value validation-ready configuration documentation because it reduces manual effort and helps keep changes reviewable.  ACE can be set up so search, dashboards, analytics, validation outputs, and controlled external sharing are easy to use, making daily operations for efficient and making audits far easier to prepare for.