In a manufacturing company, the most important documents—apart from technical specifications and drawings—are, of course, all kinds of work standards in the form of procedures and, above all, work instructions. While technical drawings are usually maintained in dedicated systems, broadly defined process documentation most often ends up on shared network drives within the company. Considering that the average person often has trouble finding a document they created themselves and saved on their own computer, locating anything on a network drive managed simultaneously by 30 people (quality, logistics, engineering, project managers, etc.) becomes a real puzzle.

When the lucky finder finally locates the document, it usually turns out that four different versions exist on the drive. All that remains is to check the modification dates to determine which one is the most recent—and theoretically, work can begin. Theoretically, because in most cases there is no certainty whether the document has been reviewed and approved by competent persons in accordance with customer requirements, IATF, or ISO 9001. Some companies do store approval information in emails, but this information is usually unavailable to the person who needs assurance that they are using the latest official version of the document.

A real “gem” is paper-based approvals, where an approver caught in the corridor signs off a document “on the fly”, with virtually no opportunity to review its content. When a company is diligent and responsible persons actually review documents before signing, another trap often appears—the so-called “lost documents”. The author sits wondering on whose desk their dusty masterpiece is lying.

This story is neither a mockery nor a caricature. Such document management methods had their place in times when there was a single customer and one product variant. Today, companies typically run multiple projects simultaneously, and the level of product customization means there are numerous models in production. Engineering changes occur from day to day. The volume of documentation and the frequency of changes make such systems impossible to keep under control. As a result, paper-based document management process becomes increasingly unreliable and inefficient, prompting a gradual shift toward providing production employees with documents in electronic form.

When designing our document management module, we assumed that:

• there may be thousands of documents, and the system must ensure fast and effortless identification
• due to the large number of employees issuing documents, the system must enforce certain standards, achieved through proper configuration of permissions and access rights
• document approvals must be carried out electronically, including appropriate email notifications, so approvers have time to review documents and authors know where their documents are in the process; approvals should be possible sequentially, in parallel, or in a mixed model
• identifying document types is crucial so that the creation process matches their importance
• the system should primarily provide access only to the current version of a document, achieved through a mechanism that automatically archives obsolete versions
• to ensure proper communication of changes, the system allows notifying employees and even collecting electronic confirmations that they have read newly issued documents—particularly useful for health and safety documentation
• many documents require periodic reviews; the system enables assigning them at any cycle (annually, every three years, etc.)
• an operator login that allows production staff to find, in just two clicks, only the documents relevant to the operation, project, or machine they are working on

If our thoughts on the module described above have caught your interest, contact us via the contact form. We will arrange a short, free-of-charge presentation of our system's capabilities - either at your company or online.