Our team has noticed a wonderful trend amongst our clients that we anticipate will challenge some antiquated ISO auditors out there who are used to the document control ways of old.
As more and more organisations undertake the digital transformation journey that is required, either by necessity under COVID-19 restrictions, or to keep up with what clients are demanding, we are seeing the management of documented information for quality assurance and other ISO 9001 certifications within Content Management Applications or Content Management Systems.
Whether it’s leveraging SharePoint wiki pages, or use of applications like Confluence, gone are the days of document numbers, versioning and publish dates in document headers and footers.
Under this model, documented procedures are now available on mobile devices from any location, when and where they are needed – no longer dependent on printed materials for frontline access and minimal risk of use of obsolete versions.
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We are all aware that the ISO Certification standards have long ago removed the specific requirements to detail document control on management system documents, however control over documentation must still be maintained.
The key difference in this day and age is the point of control and who control documents maintained is a CMS now resides with the application and publisher of the document, which may no longer be the document author or owner, or quality department – due to access control and permissions it could now sit with the IT team or online site owner or administrator.
Further still, the management of versioning within CMS is for the most part automated and managed in the back end of the application; often with audit trail, version history and evidence of version control out of the document owners reach.
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As industry takes the journey of digital transformation, so too must our field of experts; adapting the ways that have served us well in the past, but are no longer relevant or all organizational contexts and systems.
As technology advances, industry uptakes those advances and information is more and more available at worker fingertips, our auditing minds need to stretch and adapt to the new ways of working.
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Our team are very excited to see (and implement ourselves) the next advancement in simplifying and digitizing work and are thoroughly enjoying the insights our clients provide us with for improving accessibility, efficiency and reducing the weight involved in meeting the requirements of ISO standards!
Our prediction is that virtual Management Review Meeting recordings will be the next challenge for our field to overcome!