Verifying Documents have been removed or destroyed once the Retention Period expires

[Jim Wynne]

Re: Verifying Documents have been removed or destroyed once the Retention Period expi

If you are talking about documents, then ISO9001 does not ask for defining any retention period for them.

Records are documents.

 

[Wes Bucey]

Re: Verifying Documents have been removed or destroyed once the Retention Period expi

Within our system we auto archive at 3 years after a project is completed, then auto delete after 7 years, by default we have a archive and delete time period assigned to each category of document. Works wonders being all electronic, to date 89 Terra bytes of documents and climbing.



A dam big nightmare if done manually.

As Jim points out below, documents include records of activities as well as plans and other documents which have a much longer life span than an arbitrary number of days or years. Using "auto delete" would mean destroying all corporate records after seven years. That might not sit too well with entities like the USA which go to great expense to save original documents after hundreds of years (Declaration of Independence, for one.) It wouldn't go over too well in my own household where I have my birth certificate, my dad's and my mom's birth certificates, and the family Bible from my great grandmother - all documents.

What you probably meant to say:
"our organization automatically deletes documents related to orders, but we keep things like instruction manuals for machines older than seven years, plus we have other categories of documents which are not entered into the queue for automatic, unreviewed deletion or destruction."

I suspect you also have some categories of documents which are maintained as hard originals in addition to electronic versions.

Records are documents.

 

[JaneB]

Re: Verifying Documents have been removed or destroyed once the Retention Period expi

Ron, do you need to verify this? Not trying to be smart, but there's no formal requirement in the Standard to do so and I'm wondering if you're operating on a misunderstanding perhaps?

Unless you really need to verify this for some good reason, I'd take the excellent advice already given. Specify minimum retention periods only. This enables people to know that they can be destroyed/deleted/whatever after the period is up, and then do this when it suits. It at least (hopefully) stops the endless keeping of stuff 'just in case'.