MISSION STATEMENT

To create a filing system that will enable any user to find anything on any job within 15 seconds.

INTRODUCTION

I have worked for many National and International companies, which have excellent Quality Management Systems (QMS).  All the procedures in a QMS require staff to produce documents.  However, almost without exception the QMS is silent on where these documents are to be filed.  As a result they are filed randomly on each job/project and are therefore not easy or at worst impossible to find.

Surely the point of producing all these business critical documents is to communicate to others on the Project Team?  Simple straightforward retrieval of these documents is the key to success.

Something else can make it even more difficult to find documents and that is files, which have a different name to the document it is.  This is a surprisingly common mistake, which greatly reduces the chance of a document ever being found.

ISO 9001 Quality management systems – Requirements (2000)

Clause 4.2.4 of ISO 9001 has only one short paragraph on control of records:

4.2.4 Control of records

Records shall be established and maintained to provide evidence of conformity to requirements and of the effective operation of the quality management system. Records shall remain legible, readily identifiable and retrievable. A documented procedure shall be established to define the controls needed for the identification, storage, protection, retrieval, retention time and disposition of records.

In my experience the key aspect of this statement is “readily identifiable and retrievable”.  This is almost never addressed in Quality Management Systems.

The most effective system that works is based on the “bleedin’ obvious”.  In this blog I am going to attempt to point out the “bleedin’ obvious” to you.  I am not setting out to give you a solution but more to set you on the right path.