QUALITY MANAGEMENT

What is Document Control?

Document control is central to virtually every organisation, document control is a series of practices that ensures that documents are managed systematically – created, evaluated, allocated, and disposed of in a certifiable manner. Efficient document control safeguards that all appropriate information is accessible for your employees to do their jobs.
It is mostly used in ISO standards, including ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 9001:2015.

Why is document control important?

Document control is the cornerstone of the quality management system (QMS). Although document control might not be the most refined activity, it is a preventive measure that ensures that only approved, current documentation is being used within the organisation. Document control becomes the only source of certainty you can use to ensure that the right things have been done. This is because the right people are involved and that the appropriate products or services have been implemented as envisioned.

Your employees can become overwhelmed and confused when they are unable to find information or know how to store it. It ends up on their hard drives, or they set up some other storage system to share files, but those are just dumping grounds for random documents. Documents need to be controlled effectively, traceable and kept in a secure location so that they are reliable, traceable, and able to be verified as authentic, as this will lead to the assurance of quality. In other words, quality assurance cannot exist without document control.

Document Control Best Practices:

Many people nowadays have switched from traditional document management to digital document management. Managing documents electronically is much easier to maintain, electronic files are much safer, and they can easily be accessible and tracked.

Here are a few guidelines for the control of documents (paper or electronic):

1. Consistent Folder structure and naming of documents

• Consistency with the way you structure your folders ensures that there are no errors when creating new folders – keep the name and structure consistent across the organisation.

2. Setup roles and responsibilities

• Ensure clear rules placed for maintaining and managing documents. This in turn ensures that anyone who accesses the documents will have to follow to a consistent conduct, preventing any disruption within the management system.

3. Granting Access and Permissions

• To minimize the number of threats to confidential information from internal and external sources, it’d be better to only appoint a few authorities to handle documentation, this ensure that the maintenance of the documents follows a consistent conduct.

4. Avoid duplication

• This can be achieved by setting appropriate document retention policies or using a software that eliminates duplicated entries. Duplicated documents can cause confusion and inaccuracies in the management system.

5. File Sharing Security

• Document management is heavily reliant on security. Your confidential information shouldn’t be exposed to the world. Or worse, your client’s confidential data ending up in the wrong hands
• You could end up divulging the name, date of birth, transactions, etc. It could destroy your reputation.
• Encrypt your files, folders and content that may require an extra layer of security.
• We recommend using any software that offers password protection, encryption features and owner identification.

6. Audit your document management system

• Auditing ensure that everything is operating as planned, you can conduct an internal and external audit for your document management to identify any weak points for continuous improvement.

Effective documentation management is also helpful when conducting a business audit, as it facilitates access to the required documents