Is document control a person or process?

As part of our year-end review as we look towards 2017, let’s take a step back and look at what you’re doing currently with regards to your document control work.

We asked this question in an earlier blog post (one of our most popular ones in fact) but it’s worth revisiting:

Does your company treat document control as a person or a process?

To quote our own post:

Document control doesn’t mean the same thing to every company. Maybe it’s a department (with staff and management), or maybe it’s someone who handles all the clerical work, or maybe it’s just part of everyone’s job –a process like everything else. Your software choices should take this into account.

We’ve seen cases where a company has a dedicated document controller(s) but even with this structure still finds the work too much to handle manually using their existing processes.

On the other hand, we have also seen cases where a company moves from having someone – perhaps a project assistant or another administrative person – handling document control work as needed until it got to the point where it became too much to be handled on a part-time and somewhat unstructured basis.

Finally, we have also seen instances where document control is something that is handled as needed and everyone chips in and does their part.

Which situation are you in?

As we’ve discussed in the past you can add structure to your document control processes and department with DocBoss. Among others things, DocBoss can help you address these questions and much more:

• Who in your organization creates new documents and who authorizes them?
• How are documents maintained and revised?
• How do you track revisions and ensure you’re working with the most recent version?
• Who has access to documents and specifically, what level of access do they have?
• What level of reporting do you provide?
• How do you handle templates that your customers provide you to work with?
• How do you tell at any given time where documents are in the process?
• How can you reduce/eliminate holdbacks at the end of projects?

Once you start adding structure to your document control work, you’ll find that it becomes less time-consuming, less frustrating and more efficient. DocBoss was designed to help you facilitate this.