impi! and TeamPage Reduce Administration of Document Control

In this article we build a case for using TeamPage and impi! wiki templates to save administrative time for document control and support the intent of ISO9001:2015 to distribute the responsibility of the Quality Management System to the leadership of the organisation.

In 2018, Impi Development engaged in business development talks with a manufacturing company in the Durban area. The organisation had completed the transition to the 2015 version of ISO9001. The QA manager was still managing writing of standard documentation on behalf of the other heads of department (HODs). The Durban company's document management system was still Word and Excel based. Maintenance of the document change control and register was thus still manual as was the risk register. The QA manager reckoned that document management would account to one week per month or 3 months per year of administration.

In May 2019, Pierre enquired with Liezel Eksteen, Quality Assurance (QA) manager at CounterPoint Trading (cpttrading.co.za) about her workload to manage the firm's TeamPage/impi! based document management system.

CounterPoint was successfully accredited for the ISO 9001 Quality Management System in April 2019. From her past and current experience in developing and maintaining such management systems Liezel would have spent three weeks per month to build up the documentation on the ramp up to accreditation. With TeamPage/impi! her engagement was about one week per month. Maintenance of the system necessitates about 8 hours per month or five times less than that of a manual system. Liezel points to two main reasons: technological and systemic.

Technical benefit of using TeamPage.

The moderation capability allows for wider collaborative content change, but easy content control and monitoring. This means that content can be created by multiple users and yet conform to the company requirements.

The audit trail records all changes – not just edits – including tag changes, publish / draft actions. There is no need to maintain a document register; TeamPage does it for the QA function.

Systemic benefit of using impi!

The organisation of the documentation in a wiki type, access to a multitude of standard templates and the use of signature requirements makes it easy for process owners to take procedural responsibilities. The onus is now on the HODs to manage the content of their own documentation, review it and insure its relevance. This is one of several intents of the transition from the 2008 to the 2015 version of ISO9001: responsibility for the quality management system is distributed throughout the entire organisation.

So the time that Liezel saves in non-value activities that the Durban QA manager still performs manually makes up for a large share of the cost of the annual licensing for TeamPage/impi!, but is now being applied to the improvement of the quality management system in the areas of Non Conformity, risk and internal auditing.

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