Document Control

With Document Control, never worry about inaccuracy and non-compliance of documentation files and processes. Stendard Solution™ document control software comes as a digital solution for your entire document management lifecycle.

Ensure perfection with our Document Management System

Want to check a document before publishing or sending it?

No worries, we got you! Within the Stendard Solution™ document management system, you can preview any document to spot unsatisfactory parts before going on to the next step.

Quality is always at the core of our business, and we want you to have it too!

Sign Anywhere, At Anytime

An e-signature or electronic signature is an efficient, legally binding method to get approval on electronic documents.

It is secured and verifiable and can replace a handwritten signature in virtually any process inside your entire organisation or external partner.

You can practically sign and send documents anywhere and anytime with electronic signatures!

Achieve regulatory compliance with up-version control

Document up-version enables you to manage and track various document versions within your organisation effectively.

With the up-version function, you can:

  • Set confidentiality status of any documents

  • Input a change description for any altered documents

  • Attach any affected/required documents with the updated version to allow another assignee to review changes made before acknowledgement or approval.

Now, you can ensure that all relevant personnel will work on the appropriate document, eliminating potential errors.

With Stendard Solution™, you can digitise and easily control documents with notifications, ensuring proper storage and review frequencies meet regulatory requirements.

Editing files online has never been easier

Online Document Editing provides you with a function to easily edit and publish any documents.

Have you ever been in a situation where you are in an approval process and want to edit a document because of some missing information?

No worries, with our online document editing function, you can edit your document online easily and re-initialise it within the workflow.

Now you can edit and publish your documents efficiently to meet project deadlines and requirements.

Easy control of version numbering

If you have a specific version numbering format that you want to adhere to, this feature is for you!

With version numbering, you can preset a format that documents and files must follow whenever undergoing an up-version.

Track document version easily with version history

The version history feature within Stendard Solution™ systematically indexes and lists the version order of all documents and files within your organisation.

This functionality facilitates your convenience by providing a fast and reliable way to check and track the vast array of documents you may have when facing an impending audit.

Why do we need document control software?

With our document control software, never worry about inaccuracy and non-compliance in documentation files and processes. Using Stendard Solution™, you can now enjoy easy document storage, document approval, document update, document tracking, document versioning, managing access to these documents and archiving the obsolete documents to maintain compliance.

Document control refers to enforcing document management standards within a given workplace or other definable scopes to ensure compliance between the files with regulations and internal quality management systems.

Document management systems are a form of quality control that encompasses building and enforcing a set of document control procedures that collectively govern the document creation, review process, modification, issuance, distribution, and accessibility of documents within a particular setting.

Imagine being an organisation without robust document management software. Many document control-related problems could arise, such as the unintended usage of outdated records. Good document management software helps organisations ensure consistency, efficiency, security, and quality and maintain compliance within their documents. Let us elaborate on how good document control software can benefit an organisation.

 

Consistency

Proper document control supports robust practices that ensure all employees work with the same documents and standards to prevent confusion and headaches.

For example, you change your return policy and update your policy handbook. However, your retail staff are not alerted to the changes and has multiple customers approaching them for return queries.

The lack of updated information procedures will cause them to provide inaccurate information to the customers, indirectly affecting the business’s operations and potentially your company’s branding.

This is just one scene depicting the lack of document control processes within an organisation. There are many more reasons why document control software is vital in every organisation.

 

Efficiency

Users can find internal and external documents in multiple locations and applications for an organisation. This situation triggers the need for document control software to organise and track records for easy access by employees who need them.

A suitable document control software also manages content by utilising workflow processes and systems, which helps to reduce redundancy. From users’ perspectives, good document control software helps them save time when looking for documents and checking their validity compared to manual processes.

 

Security

As the world increases its efforts towards digitalisation, the information security procedures of digital documents are a prevalent issue among organisations across the globe.

Good document control software helps establish critical security protocols to help protect essential documents, regardless of internal or external documents, from unintended use, such as customer and credit card information.

Secure file sharing of business documents or sensitive documents are also key features in document control software.

 

Quality

A robust document versioning process is the core of exemplary document control software. It ensures quality by helping to track document revisions. The document authoring function prevents document changes by unauthorised staff and orders document versions to ensure employees always work with the latest information.

For example, a well-documented procedure within a retail business can prevent customers from ordering an item no longer available.

 

Compliance

Depending on the industry, some organisations must ensure compliance with specific regulatory standards to pass audits and be certified. Sound document control systems ensure that an organisation always complies with the relevant standards and requirements.

Why is document management software essential to your QMS?

A quality management system (QMS) is a system that manages documentation, procedures and responsibilities to achieve quality policies and objectives to deliver quality products and services to customers consistently.

An organisation is strongly encouraged to utilise quality management or document control software to implement sound document control systems. Within the software, there must be functions or modules to address these issues:

  1. Able to facilitate crafting security protocols to dictate proper security measures whenever working with documents and records.

  2. It has a good version controlling function that identifies the most relevant documents to prevent confusion with older versions.

  3. Has proper change control functions that enable access control to determine who can change a specific set of documents or data whenever required. Controlled documents are more unlikely to be tampered with or lost.

  4. It also has a good review and approval function to manage document approval, review, and acknowledge new document versions.

  5. It must also provide a documented audit trail to provide transparency and non-refutability.

How do you maintain document control?

With robust document control software, organisations can benefit from document control practices that ensure that every document has straightforward navigation, hierarchy, and structure.

While building a document control process, organisations must synchronously ensure that the documents remain legible and readily identifiable, using terminology users can understand and adhere to.

To maintain document control, you can utilise 3rd party software that facilitates the document control process.

Stendard Solution™ is software that fulfils all the above requirements, thus ensuring that any organisation can achieve regulatory compliance to their relevant ISO standards. We also provide a wide range of consultancy services on various standards, such as ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 13485, etc., to refine our software usage further.

Using Stendard Solution™, we empower all our clients to have the proper controls to execute their document control process to achieve a robust quality management system. With that being said, here are some tips that you should look out for when maintaining proper document control.

 

Ensuring that your system accommodates all document types

Documents can come in various types and functions. For example, a job description document has different review and approval process steps compared to another kind of document, such as a work instruction.

When designing and maintaining a robust document control system, it is vital to ensure that your document workflow is versatile and can be applied to the various document types within your organisation. This is to allow personalisation in the complete document lifecycle management.

A flexible document control system lets you build the system around your quality processes rather than adapting your operations to the requirements of a piece of software.

 

Able to configure metadata

In essence, metadata describes other data. Metadata gives a structured reference in sorting and identifying the attributes of the information. Examples of metadata for documents are:

  • Owner

  • Review cycle

  • Effective date

  • Relevant ISO elements

Within document control and document management systems, metadata is crucial for tasks like categorising documents, reporting documents, and searching and filtering documents.

Having a document control software that enables the inclusion and configuration of metadata will essentially allow the creation of specific categories, keywords, unique fields and more. With these options, you can better optimise your document control process to meet your organisation’s goals and needs.

 

Intelligent business rules for review and approval process

A sound document control system must have a controlled review, approval and distribution process based on the business processes you’ve configured for any specific document type.

Flexible routing options are essential, as are intelligent business rules to reduce inefficiencies and bottlenecks within the workflow process. Here are some tips when constructing smart business rules:

  • For complex business processes, customers could use a conditional routing option.

  • Sending documents to others should be done in a sequential order that makes sense.

  • For parallel routing, when sending documents to a group all at once, there should be an option for more detailed rules like moving the document forward if most people approve it.

  • There should be delegation rules to send documents to a designated alternative when the responsible party is out of the office to prevent bottleneck issues.

  • Escalation rules send reminders for impending due dates and notify supervisors of an overdue document.

 

Intuitive Filtering and Data Security

Data and document security are fundamental to compliance and process excellence. You must ensure that only appropriate personnel can access, approve, review and revise critical documents.

To facilitate that, your document control software has to have easy access controls and intuitiveness in configuring the viewing, editing, and approving permissions for individual users or groups. This ensures that your team works efficiently, effectively and securely, even in multi-levelled organisations.

 

Enable PDF publication

To prevent potential altering and editing of approved documents, a suitable document control software should have the function of converting approved word or excel files to PDF. This can discourage unwanted file modifications by unauthorised users.

Your document control software should also keep the original, editable attachments hidden and secure for easy access controls by subject matter experts as part of the change request process.

Frequently Asked Questions

Document management system refers to the standard operating procedures for storing, locating, updating, tracking and sharing documents.

In a nutshell, it refers to the processes undertaken to turn paper documentation into electronic documents, simplifying the handling of large amounts of documentation and data within an organisation.

On the other hand, document control systems manage and control documents encompassing security, version control, review, approval and submission. It is identifying and knowing which document is the most up-to-date (version control) and who can make changes to documents (change control). It takes care of storage for obsolete documents while ensuring they are accessible whenever required. Document control also includes the approval of documents whenever revisions are made by the supplier that manages documents or the vendor receiving them.

Do you have any questions?

Drop us an inquiry now!