Tag: Sparta Systems

Thoma Bravo investment in Sparta Systems signals growth opportunities for EQMS leader
San Francisco, CA Jul 7, 2014 – Thoma Bravo, LLC, a leading private equity investment firm, announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Sparta Systems, Inc., a global leader in enterprise quality management solutions (EQMS), from current investors Summit Partners and Altaris Capital Partners. Financial details were not disclosed, and the transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2014.
“We are excited about the Sparta Systems acquisition due to the compelling opportunities for growth, both organically and from additional acquisitions that enhance the company’s offerings,” said Scott Crabill, a managing partner at Thoma Bravo. “As a proven EQMS leader with a strong customer base and a defensible position in the industry, it fits our investment and company growth strategy extremely well.”
Founded in 1994, Sparta Systems currently has over 650,000 users in more than 30 countries. The company maintains an extensive customer base in many highly regulated industries, which includes the top 30 pharmaceutical, 12 of the top 15 medical device and leading consumer products and discrete manufacturing companies.
The company offers a platform – led by its flagship product TrackWise® – that enables manufacturers to deliver products to market safely and efficiently. Sparta’s solutions provide powerful visibility and traceability across its customers’ quality management activities, allowing organizations to address a multitude of escalating challenges including: mounting regulatory oversight, increased public scrutiny, growing supply chain and business process complexity and increased pressure to deliver greater profits. In addition, the company recently released Stratas™, a revolutionary, cloud-based solution that extends TrackWise beyond a corporation’s four walls to external suppliers and manufacturers.
“Thoma Bravo’s investment allows us to continue our superior growth trajectory, by strengthening our ability to deliver innovative solutions to customers faster, as well as accelerate our vertical market growth,” said Eileen Martinson, CEO of Sparta Systems. “I’m confident that this will enable us to not only enhance our current customer offerings, but to be opportunistic about acquisitions that will add to our product portfolio.”
“Eileen along with her management team have built an incredible company, and we couldn’t have been more impressed with the people at Sparta Systems,” said Arvindh Kumar, vice president at Thoma Bravo. “We look forward to partnering with them to continue building on their position as the preeminent EQMS provider.”
Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal advisor to Thoma Bravo. Lazard acted as financial advisor and Proskauer as legal advisor to Sparta Systems.

New Solution Can Help Companies Improve Margins by Reducing Costs of Poor Quality
Hamilton, NJ Jan 21, 2014 – Sparta Systems Inc., an industry pioneer and global leader in enterprise quality management solutions (EQMS), today announced the release of Stratas, a new cloud solution that extends the Company’s flagship quality management software, TrackWise®, beyond a customer’s four walls to external suppliers and contract manufacturers, thereby reducing risk and improving efficiency throughout the value chain.
Stratas addresses a critical marketplace need by integrating and extending quality related processes across an organization’s entire supplier and partner network. By providing third party organizations secure access to participate directly in a customer’s EQMS, Stratas eliminates the inefficient, manual methods typical in managing quality in the supply chain– enabling seamless, electronic management of the entire business process and thousands of related manual transactions annually. The result is unparalleled transparency, management and control over external quality. Coupled with the use of TrackWise Analytics, organizations will broaden their ability to conduct pro-active analysis on the entire landscape of internal and external quality data.
Stratas creates a more effective supplier quality management system by:
• Helping to reduce the likelihood of adverse quality events by enabling the orderly, consistent benchmarking of suppliers and contract manufacturers;
• Reducing errors and loss of critical information, helping to prevent non-compliance and improving security; and
• Driving stronger process regiment and shorter response times, delivering substantial efficiency improvement
“Stratas will revolutionize how companies manage quality in their supply chain, especially when you consider that more than fifty percent of product recall root causes can be attributed to supplier and contract manufacturer issues, ” said Eileen Martinson, Chief Executive Officer of the Company. “With recall costs easily averaging between $10 million and $90 million or more, organizations need to do everything they can to improve visibility into both internal and external quality, helping to ensure consumer safety while mitigating risk and litigation exposure and continuing to improve efficiency.”

Comprehensive Offering Provides Flexible Access to Key Quality Processes
Hamilton, NJ Jan 9, 2014 – Sparta Systems Inc., an industry pioneer and global leader in enterprise quality management software (EQMS) solutions, today announced the availability of a comprehensive mobile solution product suite designed to improve the operational efficiency and effectiveness of its customers’ increasingly mobile workforce. Organizations are now able to significantly expand the reach of their quality processes, reporting and analytics beyond the four walls of their businesses.
Sparta Systems’ mobile product suite includes:
• Decreased cycle times for approvals and routing by enabling mobile and time-constrained resources to perform critical approvals and reviews;
• More rapid entry of quality events and customer complaints from virtually any location at time of occurrence– accelerating the investigation and remediation process, and improving compliance;
• Easy to use, intuitive applications; and,
• Fast adoption and roll-out in organizations with geographically dispersed and on-the-road staff
TrackWise Mobile – Mobilizes the full spectrum of business processes managed within a customers’ TrackWise environment. This capability is delivered as a turn-key, subscription service, greatly reducing the complexity traditionally required to deploy a mobile solution.
TrackWise Mobile Analytics – Allows for the consumption of reports and analytical output, including interactive capabilities such as sorting, filtering, calculations and adaptive charting. Managers and executives are now able to more rapidly gain insight from data, allowing them to be proactive in decision making regardless of their physical location.
TrackWise Audit Execution Package – Enables auditors to perform all field audit related tasks directly from their iPad, without having internet connectivity, providing further flexibility and efficiency beyond the common use of laptops today.
These Sparta Systems’ mobile offerings provide the following business and usability benefits:
“The launch of Sparta System’s mobile product suite underscores our continued commitment and investment in our customers,” said Eileen Martinson, Chief Executive Officer. “The entirely reinvented mobile user experience, combined with delivery as a turnkey service will rapidly accelerate customers’ time to adoption and realization of value.”
TrackWise Mobile product suite has been optimized to work on most Apple iOS devices, with support for Android devices expected later this quarter. To learn more view the TrackWise Mobile video or visit www.spartasystems.com.

Integration of TrackWise® and Veeva Vault QualityDocs to Streamline Quality Management Processes and Documentation
Pleasanton, CA and Hamilton, NJ Oct 1, 2013 – Sparta Systems and Veeva Systems today announced plans to deliver a complete, fully integrated quality solution. The two companies will integrate Sparta’s market-leading enterprise quality management solution, TrackWise, with Veeva Vault QualityDocs, a cloud-based document management solution to manage controlled documents across the enterprise. Bringing together quality process and document management in a single, end-to-end solution will enable life sciences companies to strengthen compliance, improve efficiency, and lower costs.
“Sparta’s strategic relationship with Veeva is a significant milestone as quality-conscious organizations move to streamline mission-critical work processes,” said Eileen Martinson, CEO of Sparta Systems. “Product safety incidents are growing as a result of supplier quality issues. The integration of these products, complemented by our soon-to-be-released cloud-based supplier quality solution, will help ensure safety and efficiency across the enterprise and supplier network.”
“Partnering with Sparta, the market leader in enterprise quality management systems, we have the opportunity to deliver greater strategic value for our joint customers,” said Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva Systems. “Through the integration of TrackWise and Veeva’s cloud-based regulated content management solution, life sciences companies and their suppliers can now manage quality processes and quality documents together, eliminating the limitations and compliance risks of traditional, disconnected systems.”
The integration between TrackWise and QualityDocs is currently planned for release to customers in the first half of 2014.

Veteran Financial Executive Has Extensive Experience with High Growth Technology Companies
Hamilton, NJ Sep 23, 2013 – Sparta Systems, Inc., an industry pioneer and global leader in enterprise quality management software (EQMS) solutions, announced today that it has appointed Steven Ford as Chief Financial Officer. He has more than 20 years of global financial management experience as CFO of both publicly listed and privately held software, technology, and professional service companies.
In addition to his Finance responsibilities, Mr. Ford will also manage Legal, Human Resources, Customer Support and Operations.
Prior to his role at Sparta Systems, Ford was CFO at TradeCard, a global cloud computing SAAS firm, with a presence in more than 90 countries. TradeCard enables complex, multi-enterprise sourcing transactions across multiple layers of the supply chain, and services two of Sparta Systems’ strategic verticals—Pharmaceuticals and Consumer Products. During his tenure there, Ford’s efforts led to significant growth in revenue, profitability and cash flow. In addition, Ford’s corporate development activity culminated in a successful merger.
Previous to TradeCard, Ford was the Executive Vice President and CFO for Innodata Isogen, a public company, where he helped to drive operational efficiencies leading to increased revenue and greater market capitalization. Throughout his career he has been instrumental in driving significant gains in company valuations by achieving revenue growth, productivity, efficiency, cash flow and strategic mergers and acquisitions. Ford also has held leadership positions at Kroll and Equifax.
“Steven’s customer focus and success with driving top and bottom line results, with a laser focus on growth and profit makes him a tremendous asset to the Sparta Systems’ team,” said Eileen Martinson, Chief Executive Officer at Sparta Systems. “His strong financial and operational capability with global companies coupled with his SAAS and cloud experience will be instrumental in launching our new cloud based supplier solutions in the coming months.”
A noted industry spokesperson and author, Steve received his BBA from Cleveland State University and his MBA from the University of Southern California. He is also a Certified Public Accountant. Recently, he served as the Chairman of the Financial Executives International (FEI) Technology Sub-Committee, which specializes in the use of software in business. FEI is the leading global organization for senior financial executives.

Hamilton, NJ Sep 23, 2013 – Sparta Systems, Inc., an industry pioneer and global leader in enterprise quality management software (EQMS) solutions, today announced that CEO Eileen Martinson will moderate a “CEOs Unplugged” panel discussion at AdvaMed 2013 in Washington, DC, on September 24.
AdvaMed 2013 is the leading MedTech Conference in North America, bringing more than 1,000 companies together in a uniquely multifaceted environment for business development, capital formation, innovative technology showcasing, world-class educational opportunities, and networking.For the discussion “Current Legislative and Policy Issues Facing the MedTech Industry,” Martinson, a recent recipient of the 2013 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the New Jersey region, will be joined by the following:
José (Joe) Almeida, Chairman, President & CEO, Covidien
David Dvorak, President & CEO, Zimmer
Stephen J. Ubl, President & Chief Executive Officer, AdvaMed
These executives will tackle a variety of topics during the panel discussion including, but not limited to: repeal of the medical device tax; Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions to improve quality and efficiency of health care delivery; ACA impact on how employers are doing business; effectiveness of the medical device user fee reauthorization agreement; and challenges associated with gaining access to new markets such as China, India and Brazil, as well as best practices for managing global resources.

Hamilton, NJ Sep 23, 2013 – Sparta Systems, Inc., an industry pioneer and global leader in enterprise quality management software (EQMS) solutions, announced today the release of TrackWise® UDI eSubmission Manager. TrackWise is the company’s award winning EQMS that is used by leading medical device companies for complaint handling, adverse event reporting, non-conformance investigation, Corrective Action/Preventive Action (CAPA), registration tracking, and other quality and regulatory processes. The release marks Sparta’s fifth supported electronic reporting standard which includes support for eMDR and eMDV electronic submission processes.
The new FDA ruling calls for labelers to submit product information concerning medical devices to FDA’s Global Unique Device Identification Database (GUDID), unless they are subject to an exception. Specifically, it requires that product registration data is packaged and submitted to GUDID using XML transport and delivery. The TrackWise UDI eSubmission Manager performs this packaging and transmission to the GUDID gateway. Once the GUDID gateway receives the information, it sends back an acknowledgement which is tracked as an integrated part of the workflow. This provides the traceability for the initial UDI registration. Any subsequent product change, initiated through TrackWise Change Control process is handled the same way, effectively maintaining the history of UDI updates as required by regulation.
In addition to handling UDI product information submission, Sparta Systems recognizes the wide range of impact the newly required standard will have, and is already working consultatively with medical device and combination products companies to understand and make the required changes to their quality processes and systems.
“Our close, strategic relationship with many of the leading medical device companies allowed us to proactively build this product in advance of the final ruling from the FDA,” said Mike Jovanis, Sparta Systems’ Vice President of Product Management and Strategy. “We are proud to deliver an immediate solution to our customers that will not only help them comply with the new ruling, but also allow them to quickly begin implementation given the narrow window mandated by the FDA.”
The full FDA ruling can be found at https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2013-23059.pdf.

The Collaboration will Put TrackWise Technology in the Hands of More Companies to Meet Critical Compliance Needs
Hamilton, NJ Jul 1, 2013 – Sparta Systems, Inc., an industry pioneer and leader in enterprise quality management solutions, today announced a partnership with Glemser Technologies, a provider of content management services and solutions for the life sciences industry, to better develop and implement TrackWise® offerings to meet the critical compliance needs of life science companies in North America and Europe.
Sparta Systems and Glemser Technologies have worked together on a project-basis for more than 10 years. Over the past decade, the two companies implemented and maintained tailored quality management solutions within one of the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical companies. Based on their proven ability to seamlessly define, track, manage and report on core quality activities that were critical to this customer’s success, Sparta and Glemser decided to solidify their relationship and become certified partners.
“Sparta’s strategic partnership with Glemser is a major milestone in the Company’s efforts to meet the business needs of current and prospective life science customers. Glemser specializes in TrackWise configurations, customizations and upgrades, providing users with the right skills and experience needed to tailor the technology to meet the strict regulatory guidelines and requirements of the industry,” said Roy Wood, Vice President of Global Professional Services at Sparta Systems. “As Sparta looks to deliver enterprise quality management solutions that support advancements in areas like mobile, Software as a Service and analytics, we believe Glemser can provide cost-effective, implementation services that enable our users to adopt Sparta solutions at a more rapid pace.”
The partnership comes at an ideal time as Sparta recently announced the availability of the latest version of its flagship product, TrackWise 8.5. The release includes an enterprise business intelligence solution called TrackWise Analytics that introduces real-time analytics and ad hoc reporting capabilities to the core quality management functionality of the technology. Glemser has a proven track record of helping users upgrade to new versions of TrackWise, and will be instrumental in helping customers benefit from the solution’s advancements in search, querying and web services integration.
“As a Sparta Systems partner with a deep understanding of TrackWise, we are proud to offer our consulting and implementation services to help life science companies take advantage of the best technologies on the market to meet their quality and compliance needs,” said Ray Glemser, President and co-founder of Glemser Technologies Corporation. “Together we look to expand beyond our current regions and provide innovative document management capabilities to more areas of the world.”

Award Recognizes Entrepreneurial Excellence in the Software and IT Services Category
Hamilton, NJ Jun 17, 2013 – Sparta Systems, Inc., an industry pioneer and leader in enterprise quality management software (EQMS) solutions, today announced that CEO Eileen Martinson received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2013 Award in the software and IT services category in New Jersey. The award recognizes outstanding entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities.
Now in its 27th year, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Program is considered one of the world’s most prestigious business awards, with program finalists and winners selected by an independent panel of judges. Martinson is a twenty year software veteran with a proven track record of taking technology companies to the next level. At Sparta Systems, Martinson has led the company from status quo to accelerated growth in less than two years.
“Since taking over as CEO in 2011, we have established a number of strategic initiatives to help drive the accelerated growth of our company including focusing on our people and our customers,” said Eileen Martinson, CEO at Sparta Systems. “Already we are seeing very positive results from the successful adoption and execution of these initiatives. This award doesn’t just honor me, but is a true testament of the great work put forth from the whole Sparta Systems team.”

Award Recognizes Entrepreneurial Excellence in the Software and IT Services Category
Hamilton, NJ Jun 17, 2013 – Sparta Systems, Inc., an industry pioneer and leader in enterprise quality management software (EQMS) solutions, today announced that CEO Eileen Martinson received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2013 Award in the software and IT services category in New Jersey. The award recognizes outstanding entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities.
Now in its 27th year, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Program is considered one of the world’s most prestigious business awards, with program finalists and winners selected by an independent panel of judges. Martinson is a twenty year software veteran with a proven track record of taking technology companies to the next level. At Sparta Systems, Martinson has led the company from status quo to accelerated growth in less than two years.
“Since taking over as CEO in 2011, we have established a number of strategic initiatives to help drive the accelerated growth of our company including focusing on our people and our customers,” said Eileen Martinson, CEO at Sparta Systems. “Already we are seeing very positive results from the successful adoption and execution of these initiatives. This award doesn’t just honor me, but is a true testament of the great work put forth from the whole Sparta Systems team.”