Document control doesn’t have to go on vacation just because you do.
With Labor Day upon us and people possibly taking advantage of the last holiday of summer with a few extra vacation days tacked on, you might be experiencing the joys of keeping a project running while several or more colleagues are off work.
One of the more difficult and frustrating aspects of manually doing document control work occurs when someone in the process goes on vacation, quits the company or is otherwise unavailable. How difficult is it to pick up where someone left off when that person is no longer available and you can’t make heads or tails of what they did, where they stored documents, where the most recent version of each document is, etc?
E&P Magazine posted an article (see the green sidebar on page 2) where they describe a scenario where a key person on a capital project goes on vacation and the wrong pump gets ordered and once the mistake is discovered, produces a delay costing $100,000 per day resulting in cost overruns of $800,000.
Maybe this example and the associated costs are relevant to your business, maybe they aren’t. The point is that costly delays can occur when you can’t find the correct information and make a mistake based on the information you have available.
One of the benefits of an application like DocBoss is that it adds structure to your document control work, enables you to know exactly who made changes to documents and when they were made, and makes it much easier for someone to come in mid-project and pick things up in the case of a vacation or when the previous person doing the work left the company.
If you have visions of papers flying around and disorganized chaos in your document control work – especially when people are on holiday or otherwise away – perhaps this video will strike a chord.