![\"Document](\"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Document-control-engineering.jpg\" "\\"Document-control-engineering\\"")
\n\tWhat is document control?<\/a><\/p>\n What is document control engineering?<\/a><\/p>\n Document control for engineers<\/a><\/p>\n Document control procedures for engineering<\/a><\/p>\n Document control software<\/a><\/p>\n Improving your document control<\/a><\/p>\n\t Document control is the series of processes and procedures which govern and guide the mechanics of how documents move within and outside of an organisation, including every phase and aspect of a documents life:<\/p>\n The level and sophistication of document control within an organisation is usually proportionate to the level of documentation required to deliver work, as well as the regulation and legalities governing how information is created and kept.<\/p>\n Legal, insurance and medical industries are obvious candidates for tight document controls given the level of detail and scrutiny required in their records, while strict and reliable document control for engineering related industries like construction, manufacturing, oil and gas and mining is equally important on projects which have thousands of interdependent documents being accessed, exchanged and completed every day.<\/p>\n\t Document control control engineering is the conscious process of developing systems and procedures which enable better document control. Some minimum level of document control is required to simply save and send a file via email, while at the other end of the spectrum, organisations can manage millions of documents at the same time.<\/p>\n The three main elements of document control engineering are people (sometimes a dedicated document control engineer), technology (which automates often simple and sometimes complicated parts of document control) and procedures (the ‘rules’ established by people to govern what people do with documents and how they interact with the document systems and softwares).<\/b><\/p>\n Together, these pieces:<\/p>\n make up an organisations document control.<\/p>\n\t The level of importance attached specifically to document control is again related to the type of industry and work being documented.<\/em><\/p>\n But every document is inherently important, because it is created to communicate some information that someone or thing considered important enough to write down or ‘document.<\/p>\n We are going to focus on the important of document control for engineering related industries such as construction, architecture, mining, manufacturing etc.<\/p>\n In these industries, every document carries with it a lot of importance, and there are a lot of documents.<\/p>\n This is simply a summation of the type of documents, so you can imagine how important document control engineering becomes for these companies really quickly.<\/p>\n\t Document control procedures are a necessary part of document management. Without good document control engineering and document control, individuals piece together their own informal procedures which are sometimes okay individually, but a number at the scale of even a few people.<\/p>\n At the individual level, poor document control engineering results in:<\/p>\n At the team and collaboration level, lacklustre document control engineering leads to wasted time and inefficient communication through things like:<\/p>\n Over time, documents become incredibly messy until the overhead and additional time people spend every day managing documents becomes ‘normal’ – when in reality it costs you millions of dollars and thousands of wasted hours.<\/b><\/p>\n The purpose of your document control procedures is to eliminate these issues from occurring. And what do you have to do to engineer great document controls?<\/p>\n Before you go about making strict document control engineering changes and processes, one of the most important things to do is to understand why people manage their documents the way they do.<\/p>\n Maybe there is a reason that someone manages their documents in their side drawers; maybe someone labels folders a specific way so that they can be found faster etc. etc.<\/p>\n You need to gather all of this information first in order to create document controls which work well for as many people as possible (some people might still be annoyed with any type of change or disruption). But understanding why people do what they do helps you to address these informalities in formal procedures and most importantly to communicate how the new document controls will be better.<\/p>\n One of the most important elements of document control engineering is the master document or master templates.<\/p>\n Creating or identifying the masters can often require some coordination and back-and-froth with people and regulations, but establishing a master document which feeds every other document or form keeps all of your documents grounded and out of audit trouble.<\/p>\n Document management software<\/a> is inherently very good at this parent-child relationship of document controls – which you can read more about below.<\/p>\n Documents evolve and change over time as work evolves, regulations change etc. etc.<\/p>\n Because of this, a critical element of document control is to create processes around how often documents will be reviewed, updated, retired etc.<\/p>\n Your document controls and document control procedures need to create some guidelines for keeping your documents up-to-date and valid.<\/p>\n Writing up document control procedures doesn’t need to take huge amounts of time, in fact, often setting some basic rules and guidelines which are easy to follow can dramatically improve your document control.<\/p>\n The benefit of keeping your controls short and sharp is also that people find them easier to adopt and digest – and often simply to read them.<\/p>\n Document workflow diagrams can also really help here – so that people can visualise the document controls across the lifecycle of the document.<\/p>\n You may charge management with getting together to create these document controls, or you may have a designated document control engineer who creates and implements the controls.<\/p>\n Implementing change is not easy, and implementing change over activities and documents which people have done for many years can be extremely difficult.<\/p>\n Having a few champions during the roll-out process (people who have really bought in) goes a long way in implementation, but managing the roll-out requires oversight, with regular check-ins and feedback helping you create better document controls for everyone involved.<\/p>\n Your document control procedures are living and evolving, so you should always be open to improving and updating them.<\/p>\n\t So if all of this sounds like a lot of work (which it kind of is), then you may be like many companies who are looking to smarter new softwares for better and more efficient document controls.<\/p>\n One of the main reasons that non-software related document controls don’t work as well as software derived controls is that they require a lot of time. If every day document control routines require a lot of work and high levels of discipline, then you are setting yourself up for failure.<\/p>\n Document control softwares<\/a> auto-create and implement many of the procedures which must be done manually without software, and one of the key additional benefits is that the software hard-restricts these procedures and controls so that people can’t produce, use and manage documents in a way which is not in-line with document control best practices.<\/p>\n A few of the key features and benefits of document control software for engineering include:<\/p>\n Better search functionality –\u00a0<\/strong>Document control softwares enable you to search for and find documents, files and records based on multiple meta-data fields including titles, projects, custom tags, person, date etc.<\/p>\n This type of search functionality makes it far easier to find what you are looking far than arbitrary folder structures where everything always seems buried.<\/p>\n Version control – <\/strong>Document version control<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0is a really important part of overall document control. Software can automate this process, making it bulletproof.<\/p>\n Every change that is made is recorded and displayed by the software, as you see below, meaning you have tight version controls and a detailed activity trail of what has happened to that document over time.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t Automated workflows –\u00a0<\/strong>Document control systems also enable automation, which is another time-saving and control mechanism. The power and complexity of these software workflows<\/a> will differ based on the size and complexity of your company, but almost all companies can benefit from automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n For example, you may want to setup document workflows for permits and approval based documents, which require multiple signoffs or approval steps.<\/p>\n As you can see below, the responsible person is notified when the document or activity requires an action, which ensures don’t get missed or forgotten and that your documents and communications move quickly.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t Document and database linkages – <\/strong>Most documents don’t operate in a silo; most documents are ‘linked’ to other documents in some way, or reference other documents.<\/p>\n Softwares enable you to make direct links between different documents, so that people can literally see, click and navigate to related evidence or documents when required.<\/p>\n You can also reference items and tasks from company or project based databases<\/a>, which stops people having to manually enter data and jump back and forth between systems – and standardises the way in which data is captured.<\/p>\n Permissions and rights –\u00a0<\/strong>One of the most difficult aspects of maintaining document control and implementing document control engineering is to stop people from messing things up.<\/p>\n Software enables you to create hard restrictions on what people can and can’t do, can and can’t see, and can and can’t edit.<\/p>\n This is even more powerful for companies who work with a number of different internal and external stakeholders, as they can give view access or restricted access.<\/p>\n Having granular control over what users can and can’t do means only people who should be able to change the important stuff like master docs can, and everyone else can simply do their jobs. This means your controls stay in place, and people can focus on doing good work.<\/p>\n\t We have covered plenty of ground in this article about document control engineering, and hopefully the benefits of good document control engineering and the way to ‘engineer’ your path there are now clearer.<\/p>\n Documents are at the heart of every company as they are the source and medium of transferring information, which is the lifeblood of every business.<\/p>\n Treat documents like the lifeblood of your business by creating really strong and reliable document controls, and your projects and everything which flows through and around your documents will improve too.<\/p>\n\t Companies across the industries use this document version control and system software to manage project forms and documentation.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSee how\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t Document control engineering: Procedures and software for better document control JUMP TO SECTION What is document control? What is document control engineering? Document control for engineers Document control procedures for engineering Document control software Improving your document control What is document control? Document control is the series of processes and procedures which govern and guide…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","rank_math_title":"Document control engineering: Procedures and software for doc control","rank_math_description":"Document control in engineering is critical across drawings, policies, procedures and daily documents. Here's how you can improve your document control.","rank_math_canonical_url":"","rank_math_focus_keyword":"document control in engineering"},"categories":[7,18],"tags":[],"industry":[],"product":[],"region":[],"system":[],"content_type":[],"class_list":["post-9665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-systems-and-it","category-engineering"],"acf":[],"custom_permalink":"resources\/articles\/systems-it\/document-control-engineering","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9665"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=9665"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=9665"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=9665"},{"taxonomy":"system","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/system?post=9665"},{"taxonomy":"content_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content_type?post=9665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What is document control?<\/h2>\n
\n
What is document control engineering?<\/h2>\n
\n
Document control for engineers<\/h2>\n
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Document control procedures for engineering<\/h2>\n
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\n
1. Understand people’s document requirements<\/h3>\n
2. Creating master templates<\/h3>\n
3. Identifying the important elements of your documents<\/h3>\n
4. Create and write up procedures<\/h3>\n
5. Overcome resistance and monitor the document controls<\/h3>\n
Document control software for engineering<\/h2>\n
![\"Project](\"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/18-07-31-Systems-IT-Version-Control-1.png\" "\\"Systems")
\n\t![\"Sitemate](\"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Sitemate-documents.png\" "\\"Sitemate-documents\\"")
\n\tImprove your document control to improve your project controls<\/h2>\n
![\"Sitemate](\"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/World-map-users.png\" "\\"Sitemate")
\n\tSee how you can easily streamline your systems and processes with Sitemate today<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLearn more \u2192\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWatch a demo\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t
![](\"https:\/\/env-sitematecom-staging2.kinsta.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/20-11-11-User-pair-37-1-1.svg\")
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