The first thing we’re going to talk about is numbering like a pro. There’s really a few components to this. There’s internal and external numbering that both need to be mastered to achieve professional status. Internally, you want to use a consistent numbering scheme, because inconsistent numbering confuses your teams, makes reporting a nightmare, and makes you look like a dunce. Also, you want to think about simplifying your internal numbering systems. Being too tricky, clever, or fancy can cause confusion among your team which means they won’t follow the rules or can’t find what they need. Keep it simple. The second aspect of this is external or client numbering. Your clients are clients and that’s where the money flows from. You want to accommodate your clients by giving them the option to view and search using the numbering that they’re familiar with. Obviously, you want to report to your clients using their numbering format as well. True professionals make this happen and the best professionals make sure this is automated. If you want to know how to automate this process email us and we can set up a consultation.

The second thing that you can do to prove that you’re a document management pro is distribute documents like a pro. The first step of mastering distributions is stop with the file servers already. Making your clients or your partners use VPN or remote desktop to log into a server or Dropbox to go look for files in a folder structure makes you look JV (Junior varsity). You want to take it up to varsity, so stop making your clients fight these backwoods systems. The second thing to think about is online distributions. Couriers, emails and all that is super old school. It’s untraceable and it’s really unsecure. If you use an application to distribute documents in a task format, you’re going to be ahead of the game. The third thing is self-service.

Document distribution isn’t just a push mechanism anymore. It’s also a pull mechanism. You want your teams, your partners and your clients to be able to go into wherever he has your documents and, like we said before, it shouldn’t be a file structure on a server or in a dropbox like application. You want them to be able to log in and access what they have permissions to see very quickly, very easily. Documents should be in a register with filters, NOT A FOLDER STRUCTURE. They should be able to export live data and download documents in batch. I’m really inclined to think that they want on-demand access so they don’t have to view document control as a gate keeper or the arbiter of documents. These are your clients after all, so you really owe it to your clients and your partners to make it easy. If you succeed in being easy to work with, they may want to work with you more often.

The third thing to think about is how to handle markups and reviews like a pro. There are a few different things that you need to think about here. The first one is letting your tech affirmative folks do online reviews, markups, and approvals. You have people in your office, I’m sure, that really just like printing papers and marking up documents by hand and scanning them back in to their desktop and then uploading them back into a system. All that printing and scanning sounds like a huge pain to me, but some people do like it, which is why you need to accommodate your paper pushers, too. As the saying goes, “different strokes for different folks.” What does this mean? It means you want to be accommodating and make your teams comfortable with your process – otherwise they will just do their own thing or sabotage your process. It is simply human nature. On the other side of the coin, when you are accommodating it builds your reputation as good a good document controller. It also builds your departments reputation as a good document control group.

Intertwined with distributions, reviews, transmittals, and submittals that make up the daily life of a document controller, it is also important to have a history. Have a systematic way to collect each reviewer’s markups and log them to the document in the correct revision. You also want consistent and clear dispositions. When somebody walks by the hall and says, “Oh, this looks good,” and hands you a stack of documents that are all marked up, that’s not a very clear disposition. You need to know whether it’s approved, rejected, approved as noted. You need to have that document electronically in the system with all of its revisions, markups and dispositions. Preferably the logging and categorizing of these documents is automated all of that as well. If you can automate that – it’s a sure sign of a pro. If you want details on how to make that happen, email us and we can set up a consultation.

The fourth thing that you can do to handle document management like a pro is to integrate like a pro. Here are some areas that you want to be able to integrate with. Procurement, for instance, you want your suppliers and vendors to have the latest revisions because if they’re building from the wrong revision, that’s going to cost some serious cash and it could definitely come back to your document control group and make you guys look bad and cost your company money. Obviously, that is not good, so you don’t want to do that. The second area is cost control. When the cost team is preparing progress reports, it’s really a pain to go back and forth and find the progress for your document register. Cost controllers, they don’t really want to beholden to your schedule and your list of tasks to do. If you could integrate your data with your cost control system so your progress transmits automatically, you’re going to be a step ahead. You’re going to get mad respect from your cost control group.

The third area of integration is inspections. Your inspectors, like your suppliers, they need the right rev to do their job. If they don’t have the right revision, they’re either not being effective or they’re sitting in the field at the inspection site idle with nothing to do. You want to provide them with the right revisions. You also want to add an element of self-service like we talked about earlier. Nothing breeds frustration like unreliable FTPs or waiting for a thumb drive to arrive in the mail from New Orleans when you’re in the fab yard in Korea.

The fifth thing we’re going to talk about is reporting like a pro. There are three parts to reporting – consistency, consistency, consistency. Pros deliver consistently formatted reports. Otherwise it looks like the reports are just cobbled it together every week at the last minute. You look unsure and disorganized. Consistency part 2. You want to pull your reports from a central document database so all your reports and status jive. We mentioned integrating with cost control. If you produce the progress report for your client and your cost controllers produce an earned value report that breaks out document progress and the numbers don’t match, they’re going to ask the questions that are going to be pretty hard to answer. Consistency part 3. When it comes to reporting, you want to make sure your reports are client friendly, ie. Consistent with their numbering. We mentioned this earlier as well. You want to report using the client’s document numbers and make it very simple for them to see what the progress is in their own terms.