Our auditor stated that we should be connected with a service for document revision/renewal. A service that advises us of document which are obsoleted and revised. Can anyone recommend one or several that are reliable. I conducted a search but had no luck. I may have looked in the wrong place!:thanks:

Our auditor stated that we should be connected with a service for document revision/renewal. A service that advises us of document which are obsoleted and revised. Can anyone recommend one or several that are reliable. I conducted a search but had no luck. I may have looked in the wrong place!:thanks:


What kind of documents are you referring to?

ISO documents, ANSI, etc.

When your auditor said that you "should be", was this a nonconformance or a recommendation for improvement?

If a recommendation, it's up to you if you want to pursue this route. For some organizations, the costs and resources involved do not make this a value-added activity.

If this was a nonconformance, I'm curious as to the wording of the finding. ISO 9001 does not require that you use such a service for document control. Heck you could call a paper clip your "service". :)

Try techstreet (http://www.techstreet.com/tracking/track_instruct.tmpl), it's free!

Try techstreet (http://www.techstreet.com/tracking/track_instruct.tmpl), it's free!

There's also this (http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/subscriptions/subscriptionhome.asp), which ain't.

Thanks! I will check them out! It was a pre-assessment audit. He did not write us but he was intrigued as to how we knew our standards were always the latest revision. He recommended hooking up with one of these services so we could always say, "it's their job to let us know when the document is revised", I guess.:notme:

Thanks! I will check them out! It was a pre-assessment audit. He did not write us but he was intrigued as to how we knew our standards were always the latest revision. He recommended hooking up with one of these services so we could always say, "it's their job to let us know when the document is revised", I guess.:notme:
Just for the heck of it - how many different Standards are we talking about?


First of all"it's their job to let us know when the document is revised", I guess.
is NEVER a legitimate excuse. Your organization is the only entity responsible for seeing your documents are up to date. Using this as an excuse is like getting olive drab cadmium plating when you order electroless nickel with teflon and saying to your customer "it's their job to let us know whether the plating was what we promised you" - my guess is the response from the customer might be "Well, see them for your pay!"

About the only time I could see hiring a service or assigning an employee full time to track such changes is if you have thousands of orders each year which read "must comply with version of
Standard # _______________
in force as of the date of this order."

Wes! My friend you take me way to seriously. I said that simply to make the point you mentioned. It is our job to make sure the appropriate standards & spec's are adhered to. That would simply be the only reason I could think of that would make his request appropriate! That is really all one could say if the service were relied on to heavily and failed!

There's http://www.doceng.com/search.php?mode=search

Their service is free. You tell them what documents you want to keep track of and they send you a notice when the document changes.

There's also http://www.global.ihs.com/

I don't know if they have asubscription service or not, but I suspect they must. It's a great way to get business.

For documents of external origin, I have had success with:

www.document-center.com

Very resonably priced and options available for revision notifications to you.

Good Luck.

Use of a service should be seen as a convenience rather than a direct solution; as Wes points out, you're still going to be responsibile for making sure that you're using current versions, and appeals to the failure of the service will be impotent.

Slightly:topic: but... Those who were involved with supplying GM in the late 90s may recall the debacle they created with their own standards. When the rush was on to comply with their 1998 deadline for QS9000 registration, they made it known that Boise Cascade would be in charge of disseminating their standards, and would be the source for queries regarding revision status. Unfortunately, they forgot to tell Boise Cascade (since purchased by Office Max). Calls to Boise Cascade in search of the current revision levels of standards were answered by people who didn't even know that there was such a thing as revision control, and who had no way of easily accessing the information if they did know what they were looking for. In the end, in the case of the company I was working for, evidence of a subscription to GM standards was sufficient for auditing purposes, since there was no known official way to find out.

It is correct that you are ultimately responsible for ensuring your revision-level control of your documents, whether they be of external, or internal origin.
The revision monitoring service is just that...a service...a convenience for revision monitoring.
However, as stated by others above, let the buyer beware. You can bet these document-monitoring services have never seen a noncompliance issued from an auditor...if you rely on them for total control, you can bet you will though. :bonk: