Ensuring everything is of the highest quality in complex engineering projects is essential. The Document Review Cycle stands as a critical part of document control. Furthermore, the engineering document review and approval phase can often be time-consuming and error-prone if managed manually. However, the good news is that this modern-day document control and management software, like Assai, has revolutionized quality control by streamlining and accelerating the review cycles. In this blog post, we’ll delve into how document control can expedite the review process, making it more efficient and reliable.

What is a Review Cycle?

In engineering, a review cycle is a structured process where important documents like technical plans, drawings, or project details are carefully examined by a specific group of experts and stakeholders, including external contractors. This step is crucial to ensure the documents are accurate and complete, follow the required standards, and maintain high quality. Document Controllers have a key role in managing this review cycle. They’re responsible for distributing the documents to the reviewers, monitoring the progress, and collecting feedback. They collaborate with different individuals or teams who review the document, providing their input, making corrections, and giving approvals before the document can move forward in the project. With document control as a central function, this review process acts as a quality check to spot and fix errors or issues, ensuring that engineering documents are trustworthy and reliable in complex projects.

The Impact of Document Control on Review Cycle Efficiency

1. Automated Workflows: These workflows enable you to define the actions required for reviewing and approving documents. This eliminates manual coordination and ensures documents move seamlessly through the review cycle. Assai provides various easy configuration options, such as a Master Document Register, Document Distribution Matrix (driven by any combination of document metadata), and fully automated generation of transmittals, transmittal cover sheets, comment response sheets, and e-mail notifications. 

2. Notifications and Reminders: Automated systems are excellent at sending reminders and notifications. For example, Assai can be configured to send emails when documents are overdue or approaching their due date. Additionally, you can manually send reminders through a dashboard, offering flexibility and aiding in follow-ups.

3. Fully control and organize: Projects often involve multiple internal and external stakeholders. Assai provides dedicated spaces and transmittals tailored to specific groups of users, making the review process more efficient. For example, Assai Portal lets external contractors submit documents for review. These documents go through internal document controllers who (optionally) do a quality check and then send them to engineers for further review. If needed, documents can be sent back to external parties with comments. This will result in a complete set of approved documents in the project environment. 

4. Revision Control and Tracking: The revision control feature in Assai helps track changes and revisions made during the review cycle. This ensures that reviewers constantly work with the latest document revision, eliminating confusion and errors.

5. Analytics and Performance Metrics: For projects with lots of documents going back and forth, Assai provides valuable information and performance data. Document Controllers can easily see the status of documents using the distribution dashboard, a core feature of Assai’s document control capabilities.

Conclusion

A Document Management System can help eliminate manual work, reduce errors, and increase efficiency and quality. It can reduce the number of revisions needed to reach a final, approved document or drawing, which saves time and money. With automated workflows, reminders, improved organization, revision control, and useful insights, you can take your project’s document review & approval processes to the next level. 

Additional Resources

DMS Glossary: Important Definitions to Simplify Your Selection Process

Ensuring Data Integrity in Integrated Engineering Project Environments

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We have attached the following guides and related articles to give you more context about DMS and Complex Engineering Projects:

Whitepaper: What to consider when purchasing a DMS
The definitive guide to document control and document management
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