Since 1992, I’ve seen many things that make life tougher for people who use and improve management systems. These 3 things seem to be more persistent than a lot of other issues, so here we go…
First of all, there’s no need to have multiple approvals for every document. The Standards today require that we be able to show who authorized the document, and that’s where it ends. There’s no need to have the President review and approve a work instruction for the shipping dock. Yes – it happens!
Next, make your ‘revision control’ simpler. Stop adding a second method like ‘Rev A’ or ‘Rev 1.0’ to your headers. If you use ‘Last modified date: yyyy/mm/dd…’ and make the date a ‘field’ that updates automatically when an authorized person makes a change. Any time you have to alter information manually, one will get missed, for sure.
Finally, if you’re taking the time to maintain an antiquated ‘Revision table’ at the end of each document, stop it! All word processing applications have tracking features – use that if you have to for a customer or regulatory body. ISO does NOT require it any longer – check the document control clauses and you’ll see that the requirement to ‘identify revisions’ has been removed.
Know Quality, Know Profits…No Quality, No Profits
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