Every company submitting documents to an engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) partner faces the same problems: large volumes of manual work, coupled with complex (or unclear) expectations and procedures.
But what if you don’t have actual document control procedures in place?
Perhaps you don’t have the resources and simply have a project staff member or administrative colleague doing the work.
Maybe you have a document control team in place but find yourself struggling to deal with each individual project due to how much they change by customer.
Here’s what you can do.
Procedures/Training
A lack of proper execution leads directly to more stringent submission requirements on the next project. It is our assumption that formal procedures are not common at supplier organizations.
We suggest suppliers need to put more focus on building formal document control procedures, just like any other core process.
A simple process map created with key stakeholders would increase the visibility of the work, and allow suppliers to identify gaps in process, and clarify escalation points. The maturity or procedures (or lack thereof) is a topic for the next survey (lack of procedures).
How to establish document control procedures
Establish more rigorous internal document control procedures. If you have no processes, take what you get from an EPC and make it your own just like any other procedure in your company. Do a one-day sprint to formalize some document control procedures.
Run your plan past a document control expert who has significant experience working with EPCs for verification.
What else can you do?
Focused largely on tagged equipment, DocBoss minimizes the manual work required to deliver project documentation. With a unique solution which creates and links the document register to the order data, DocBoss systematically creates document metadata (including document specific tag lists).
We then use this data, (along with a heavy dose of document management and document formatting magic), to comply with document submission specifications. The DocBoss system appends customer specific cover sheets to every document, includes all relevant metadata (including tag lists), tracks approval status, location, transaction history and due dates.
Finally, it creates every document compilation (record books, shipping dossiers etc.) required for the job.
In other words, rather than setting up document control procedures yourself, you can get DocBoss to do it for you.
Interested to learn more?
Contact us to tell us how we can help you get a better handle on document control.
And in the meantime, check out this article on Compilation Templates and Layout Impacts With DocBoss. The DocBoss compilation (databooks creation) feature is one of the most popular benefit!