Documents don’t live in a vacuum. The truth is, documents affect (and are affected by) a whole range of processes, including areas like:
• Employee training
• Audits
• Change management
• Regulatory compliance
• Supplier management
Only a Document Control system that’s fully integrated with all your processes is capable of preventing issues. For example, if you update a key protocol without updating employee training requirements, it’s clear you’re going to have a problem on your hands at some point.
Or think of what could happen if your suppliers can’t access your updated SOPs, and end up working from an old version that was revised due to regulatory changes. If your product must be manufactured, tested and stored in a certain way, the outcome would be costly at best (and potentially disastrous at worst).
