From planning and implementation to final audit and review, documenting each stage of quality management becomes essential to achieving the highest quality standards, compliance, and customer satisfaction.
Certainly, hundreds of documents are created daily within the entire quality management ecosystem. But have you ever thought about what happens to them throughout their lifecycle? Can you control the document access? What if we need to revert the changes and restore the earlier version? This is where document control steps in.
Document control is referred to as a systematic process of storing, managing, tracking, and sharing documents in a secure environment. Indeed, a robust document control system helps quality teams to record entire quality procedures such as approvals, feedback, process changes, CAPA implementation, and more, infusing transparency and a sense of accountability within the organization. However, there are many more benefits of having a robust document control system.
Let's explore them one by one.
Key Benefits of Document Control in Quality Management
Ensure compliance with regulatory standards
Being compliant with the regulatory standards is mandatory, and implementing a robust document control system can strengthen your claim of assured quality. It offers a lot of features like versioning, access control, audit trails, and more that fit the regulatory requirements of industries like healthcare, manufacturing, finance, etc., eliminating the risk of non-compliance.
Ensures traceability and accountability
A robust document control system empowers users to record each stage of the quality process. It helps quality teams to access the detailed activity log, offering a complete record of who accessed, modified, and deleted the documents and when, creating a comprehensive audit trail. Leveraging automated workflows for document review, approvals, and re-approvals, coupled with digital signatures and email notifications, further enhances transparency and accountability in the quality process.
Increases operational efficiency
Often, multiple cross-functional teams are involved in the quality processes, and it's essential for them to collaborate seamlessly, share critical information, and access reports and documents. However, a document control system allows teams to leverage centralized repositories, facilitates auto-naming, and uses metadata, bringing all the key documents to their fingertips. This saves time, facilitates collaboration, and improves decision-making.
Consistency and standardization
Following a structured framework for creating and managing documents helps maintain consistency throughout the organization. A well-planned document control strategy involves creating predefined templates and formats for different reports, forms, and documents to ensure uniformity and reduce manual errors. However, organizations can also add specific access levels, assign reviewers and approvers, and create and distribute SOPs and guidelines to ensure a consistent approach to quality management.
Way forward
A robust document control strategy allows organizations to maintain a detailed record of processes, procedures, changes, and decisions made throughout the quality management operations. However, leveraging a digital solution can amplify your efforts by facilitating document access, fostering collaboration, automating workflows, and securing critical data. This leads to reduced errors, enhanced efficiency, and improved compliance, ultimately improving quality and supporting faster and more efficient decision-making.
This WhitePaper gives clear idea about Importance of Quality Management System and Salesforce for Faster Path to Compliance Manufacturers are responsible for the safety and quality of their products.
Legislators, the general public and manufacturers, themselves, recognize this indisputable fact.
Yet, this wasn’t always the case.Take the automotive industry, for example.
For most of the 20th century, American carmakers actually opposed the idea of assuming responsibility for product design flaws.
Unfortunately, it took a repeated loss of life to change this.
ISO 9001 is an internationally recognized standard for Quality Management System (QMS).
This is a generic standard that specifies requirements to implement the quality of the products and services.
This standard consistently improves the quality and also ensures the continual improvement of the Quality Management System.ISO 9001:2015 is the current standard, developed to maintain the overall quality performance of an organization.
This latest standard provides industries’ best practices to enhance the product quality and services and to improve the efficiency of processes.
This is a well-designed standard that helps the organizations meet the statutory and regulatory requirements.
Also, the ISO 9001:2015 standard provides necessary requirements to satisfy the customers’ expectations.IAS provides ISO 9001 Certification in Kuwait and also in various countries such as India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Oman, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and so on.
