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Advise on document control!

Discussion in 'Documentation Control, Procedures, Templates,...' started by Stjones, May 19, 2017.

  1. Stjones

    Stjones New Member

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    I am working as an HR manager at canned food company. We have a lot of teams and employees and there are lots of documents and sheets being handled in the office. It’s getting more and more difficult after each day and I am entrusted with finding a solution.

    I am thinking about trying some sort of document control software to manage everything in a single place. The problem is that we haven’t even gone paperless completely yet. But it’s only manageable paperworks remain. We are heavily dependent on Google docs and sheets and word and excel files. We would like to have a much better, organizable document system.

    Is there anything, anyone here can advise me to deal with this situation? How efficient will be these document control software in handling such a large amount of documents?
     
  2. Andy Nichols

    Andy Nichols Moderator Staff Member

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    As first steps, I'd have your management appoint a person for each functional area to be a document controller. Find someone - not just anyone - who understands how to work methodically and systematically, understands how to order things like files and so on. Secondly, I'd be finding out why so many documents exist in the first place and just exactly how many are really needed/used/necessary for process control etc. Thirdly, I'd look at how you currently control/organize documentation. Once you have done all these things, I might do and look for a software solution, but usually, well organized documents can be simply handled on a server by a logical file structure.
     
    Atul Khandekar likes this.
  3. yodon

    yodon Well-Known Member

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    Andy is spot on regarding understanding your processes first.

    When (and if) you do decide to adopt some software, recognize that there aren't any silver bullets out there. There's plenty of great software but everybody has a unique system (going back to Andy's post!) and so the tools have to be fairly generic out of the box. Adapting to your processes takes time and understanding. You need to establish a good set of requirements for the tool and then ask the providers what kind of service they offer. Some have fairly steep packages for tailoring the systems to your needs. You can do it all yourself but you need to accommodate for training. And there's always some overhead with such systems.

    I've seen the same software used at 2 different companies. One company didn't invest in properly tailoring the tool and ramping up the team and the whole company soured on the product saying it was lousy and nobody could use or understand it. The other company invested time in establishing requirements, understanding deployment, etc. and thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
     
    Andy Nichols likes this.