Hi There,

We have just passed the ISO 9001 Cert. this April 2006. Our second Audit will be for next year April 2007. We are planning to have 3 main Internal Audits before the main External Audit.
However, I would like to know who will be in charge of checking if the documents are properly in order. Eg, checking if each department are placing their forms with numbering, and if the departments had issued any forms that needs to be numbered.
Will it be the Management Representative(MR) or the Document Controller(DC).

Ps>the DC is mentioning that the MR should be responsible for this.

I need to clarify. THanks for your help.

Regards,
Cheryl
Management Representative

Will it be the Management Representative(MR) or the Document Controller(DC). The system belongs to your organization; you (as an organization) decide who are the process owners, doers, managers, who is accountable and who is responsible. Only your organization can (and should) make the decision.

The system belongs to your organization; you (as an organization) decide who are the process owners, doers, managers, who is accountable and who is responsible. Only your organization can (and should) make the decision.Sidney is right on the money with this! Very succinctly put - better than I have done in the past!

Hi Cheryl,

As Sydney and Wes said, the choice is yours. The question then is, how do you decide?

As the Management Rep I would suggest you want to do as little as possible. If you do lots of things, then you become a bottleneck and everyone gets annoyed with you. If you insist on doing as little as possible, you should be able to arrange for the system to become self-checking which in itself is a good thing because it's efficient.

So, your first question might be, how do numbers get onto the forms? Is that an error-proof process? If not, can it be made so? (Often, that's where document controllers come in. In some systems numbering forms is automated and the document controller makes it impossible for work to proceed with un-numbered forms.)

Once the form has a number, who uses it next? Can they check as a normal part of their work that it is numbered? If the number is a unique identifier, used to locate information in filing systems or databases, maybe they just cannot work, in which case the system is self-checking and perhaps you need to do nothing further.

So far we have talked of checking within the process, assuming that the numbers are useful in some way, e.g. as unique identifiers of forms. (If they are not, you might ask what are they for? If they aren't necessary, maybe they could be eliminated.)

Another way you can check they're numbered is with your internal audits: pick a random sample to check each time you audit. Size of sample should depend on the number of forms you deal with, the probability they'll be wrongly numbered, and the consequences of bad numbering.

So to summarise, your choices are determined by your processes, your organisation structure, workload and avoiding bottlenecks, and the consequences of bad or missing form numbers.

Hope this helps,
Patrick

Hi, I agree with Sydney and Wes,

Most logical i.m.o. is that the DC is the issuer of the document, but only the documents that are known to the DC. Numbering etc. including. The person who is responsible for the content (signatory) has to assign (any) new document to a DC. The signatory is most likely the proces owner. The MR should never be the signatory of a document that covers a proces which is not theirs.
In our company we have several issuers each issueing documents from their dept. So the MR can act as a DC or a Signatory. Hope this helps

Greetz

Hi There,

We have just passed the ISO 9001 Cert. this April 2006. Our second Audit will be for next year April 2007. We are planning to have 3 main Internal Audits before the main External Audit.
However, I would like to know who will be in charge of checking if the documents are properly in order. Eg, checking if each department are placing their forms with numbering, and if the departments had issued any forms that needs to be numbered.
Will it be the Management Representative(MR) or the Document Controller(DC).

Ps>the DC is mentioning that the MR should be responsible for this.

I need to clarify. THanks for your help.

Regards,
Cheryl
Management Representative

Check the job descriptions.

I would like to know who will be in charge of checking if the documents are properly in order. Eg, checking if each department are placing their forms with numbering, and if the departments had issued any forms that needs to be numbered.

I am coaching our internal auditors to get them to focus on document and records control as part of each audit they perform, regardless of scope or subject matter. I seems to me that it would be much harder for the "process owner" to attempt to police the process of document control from a centralized perspective.

Just my two cents.

I am coaching our internal auditors to get them to focus on document and records control as part of each audit they perform, regardless of scope or subject matter.

Likewise. If documents and records are within the process being audited, the internal audits assigned to audit the process should review the conformance and effectiveness of those applicable documents and records.

If you are looking at the concepts of document control and record control as processes on their own, it doesn't really matter who audits these areas as long as it isn't the person responsible for them.

I agree - your system, you decide. In my company it is mixture. I am the MR and the Internal auditor for 19 facilities. We have all of our documentation controlled on our company intranet. However, there are facilities with specific instructions that pertain to them only - fine by me...I tell the Mangagers at each site they are responsible for their own document control at that level. They must convince me during an internal audit that any document I review regardless of who created it, is current. Once a year, usually DEC, Jan, I begin circulating all documentation among various department heads for reveiw - and have them edit, or confirm no changes necessary, we can then update any intranet controlled forms, instructions, procedures etc. This has worked very well over the last few years.

Who would check to see if documents are in proper order if ISO 9001 didn't exsist?

Take "ISO 9001" out of the question and then determine the answer.

When you say "check", do you mean a routine thing to ensure documents are being handled as expected? Or do you mean who would audit the documents?

If you are talking about routine, non-audit stuff, then I would not ask the MR or Doc Control to do this. I would ask the department that creates the forms, uses the forms, and files the forms. I sure wouldn't ask some other department to make sure another department is completing routine responsibilites. You set a precedence that departments don't have to worry about Doc id, filing, etc.

Regards,

Dirk

Cheryl, if what you're talking about is document formatting, then I think it's easiest if a central function does that, because having multiple people involved often ends in document "lack of" control.

If you're talking about document content, I hope that each process owner is responsible for their own content. It's hard to get a newly certified company to accept broad ownership for the quality system if all the document content falls to a central function.

My :2cents:

Hi there

thanks so much for all of your replies. In conlcusion i made sure that the MR will be the one that provides framework to all of the Steering team commitee and make sure they execute this.

Thank you again.

Regards
Cheryl
The successful MR