Your APQP Documents, Who's in Control?
January 20, 2015
If you are using spreadsheets for your APQP documents, chances are revision control, document integrity and document approval systems have become or are starting to get out of hand.
Who has access to the sensitive information in your documents on a daily basis? Can you control who makes changes to these documents? It may also be difficult to determine which document is the most recent active document. You may be experiencing problems with accidental overwrites.
When it comes to seeking approval for your FMEA documents, how is this managed? If you email documents to various approvers for approval, is there more than one copy of each document floating around your organization? Who's controlling your Control Plan?
QA Assistant Studio™ advanced APQP software takes the headache out of controlling your documentation. Our in-built document control system affords you peace of mind. Let's take a look at the QA Assistant Studio document control features:
- Document Integrity
- Revision Control
- Document Approval Workflows
Document Integrity
FMEA's, Control Plans, and other APQP documents contain sensitive information about your products and processes. You will want to keep these documents secure to prevent accidental overwrite, loss of information or document corruption. QA Assistant Studio™ enables you to assign members of the team to each of your documents while allowing you to set access permissions, read only or read/write.
QA Assistant Studio™ provides a full document history for each of your APQP documents. You will know exactly who made changes to the documents, when these changes were made and what change/update that took place.
Revision Control
You will want to update and improve your FMEA's, Control Plans and Process Flows on a regular basis and here revision control is crucial to ensuring that the most recent document versions are being updated. This ensures that the vital information is current for design and manufacturing processes.
QA Assistant Studio™ offers you a robust revision control system! You will only ever have one draft copy of your APQP document, one active copy and all other copies are accessible but shown as obsolete. Changes can only occur in draft documents.
Document Approval Workflows
When it comes to seeking approval for your documents, how is this controlled? Are you emailing several copies of your documents to approvers? How do you track approval of your FMEA documents?
QA Assistant Studio's™ approval workflows provides the perfect solution for APQP document approval control.
The email document approval system can easily be set up with approval workflows to include members of the team, managers, customers and outside auditors.
Each approver will receive an email requesting their approval at the appropriate time. There is no need to continuous follow up on approvals, you can select to receive an email at each approval stage. Easy!
Approval workflows can encompass all of your approvers, you do not necessarily need a QA Assistant Studio™ license. Approvers will be emailed a temporary link to the APQP document to be approved and will even be able to provide comments when the document is approved or rejected!
Find out more about QA Assistant Studio's Document Control and other features...Start your free trial today!