What is Document control and why it is important in a business?

Every information exchanged in an organization is maintained as a document. It can be a payment receipt, an audit checklist or a performance report. Document control is the process of following document management practices to create, manage, modify, access and share documents. It regulates and maintains standards specific to documents in all of the stages: creation, review, approval, removal, retrieval, distribution, etc. Click Here to Check the Product.

Document control is required to:

• ensure availability of documents whenever needed.
• eliminate duplicate and unwanted documents.
• maintain document revisions whenever updates are done.
• ensure only authorized personnel access the documents.
• approve the document and re-approve documents before initial use and after updates.
• ensure documents are labelled based on criticality.

Proper training is required for the teams to follow these document control procedures.

Document Control Software:

When this information is written in a paper-based document fashion, it will be stored in a particular location in an organization and may not be available for many employees at the same time. Either an employee has to wait for the document to be available after use by another or the document has to be made copies or to be faxed. This causes chaos, unnecessary waiting time and unwanted costs of resources. Also, there is a possibility that old versions of the documents are missed and new revision dates are not properly updated in the ledger. This will cause incorrect reference of data leading to incorrect execution of tasks.

The document control software has emerged to solve this situation. It is an online cloud-based solution using which any authorized employee can access the documents from wherever and whenever needed. At a time, many employees can retrieve the same information. Learn More.

All the documents controlled by this software follow international quality standard ISO9001:2015 however additional quality requirements may be imposed based on the type of industry.

Following features come with automation of document control:

• Revision history – It has information such as who, when, what and where that helps to track any changes made. If there are unwanted and unapproved changes, they can be reverted.
• Audit trail and Compliance – Validates if any document is obsolete or out-of-date; if there are any violations to document codes. With this, an organization will only have up-to-date reliable information.
• Data security – Only authorized employees can view and update the documents. This ensures that the sensitive data is accessible only by trusted parties.
• Process collaboration – Documents can be linked across processes or can be attached to emails for digital signature and approval.
• Training Management – Linking the document control to training management ensures that all the new or experienced employees refer to organizational specific standard training materials to upgrade their skills.
• Data visualization and reporting – The data is transparent within the organization and employees can perform a global search, extract data with the help of filters and visualize them in tabular or reporting format.
• Backup and recovery – In case of accidental disposition or deletion of a document, the software should have a recovery procedure to retrieve the document from the backup repository.

User surveys can be conducted by the organization to validate:

• how effective the document control procedure is?
• how often documents are referred to?
• the chances of document errors
• time taken to prepare a document
• cost involved with document control processes
• If any changes can improve the quality of the document control procedures.

HQMS Document Management software:

Harrington Group has developed a world-class document control software to create, share, store and manage all kinds of documents in the entire organization. The HQMS Document management software can be accessed anywhere around the world 24/7 on a 365-day basis. With our software, you can manage any type of document, control its versions by users who created or modified it, when the revision was made and who approved the changes. You can query the information with search criteria and generate reports out of it. If your organization requires multiple documents to be linked across different modules or processes, you can do so with the help of hyperlinks. This aids in referring to the document for future tasks. Without our data security feature, you can assign access rights (create, view, edit, delete) to the employees. This makes sure that highly sensitive documents are modified only by superiors and no unintended updates are done. With all these features, HQMS document management software stands out as the one-stop source for all your document control processes.