8.2 Control of documents

It is common for organizations to have difficulty in finding important documents such as technical drawings and operating manuals. This is a poor situation to be in and the following notes should help to put in place a simple systematic method of managing your documents. It doesn’t matter if the documents are paper or electronic, the same principles apply.

Documents should be:

• Approved for use to ensure that they are correct;
• Periodically reviewed and updated to ensure they are not out of date.
• The current version should be clearly identified and old revisions filed in the archive.
• They should be legible.
• They should be easy to find and identify.

It is useful to maintain a document index, which is a simple listing of all relevant documents.