Document Control

Governance Risk and Compliance software

As part of the Sword Achiever GRC solution, the Document Control module enables organizations to visibly demonstrate adherence to Governance Risk & Compliance requirements, through the comprehensive control of documentation.

Effective document control is a key ingredient for managing adherence to corporate governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) requirements.

There are many legislative, regulatory and best-practice standards affecting organizations today and the number and complexity of these requirements is forecast to continue to increase. To help manage these demands, organizations need a system which will ensure that the latest version of a document is available at the right time, in the right place, and for the right person, with full audit capabilities.

Document control has always been important as a control system for any documents that describe corporate policies or provide instructions on how to carry out business processes. Supporting materials such as forms, price lists, terms and conditions and any reference documents are also likely to require effective control.

New and growing legislation and regulation means that it is now becoming increasingly important to control other additional documents and communication media, such as published articles, web content, promotional material, recruitment advertisements, press releases and newsletters.

Fast to deploy and easy to manage, Sword Achiever Document Control uniquely addresses these business-critical issues and forms the foundation for a corporate wide unified GRC platform.

Specific features and benefits include:

• Management of the creation, review, approval and distribution of documents using best practice processes
• Changes are controlled so that only the most current version of any document is available at any time
• Security of information, managed through role based access across the organization, automatically protecting documents and applying retention period
• Electronic signatures, compliant with 21 CFR, Part 11 Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures, giving secure signing and compliance to FDA requirements
• Association of a document with one or more standards or pieces of legislation, ensuring that compliance with individual standards can be demonstrated
• Electronic workflow processes speed up the ability to produce new or revised documentation, and eliminate the need for a paper chase for editing and approvals

 FLEXIBLE CONFIGURATION

• Customer configurable document types, categorization and keywords ensure the system reflects the business needs and that users can find information through an intuitive interface
• Configured default settings for review, approval and distribution, ensure control of approval information and ease of use for document creators

 WORKFLOW AND ESCALATION PROCESSES

• All requested reviews, approvals and notifications are sent via email notification, using existing familiar email systems. This supports fast user acceptance and reduces training requirements
• Incomplete actions can be escalated using a configurable escalation engine, ensuring that all tasks are monitored to completion

MANAGEMENT REPORTING FOR COMPLIANCE DOCUMENTATION

• Reports identify all outstanding actions in the system, making the task of prioritization easier and highlighting potential problems straightforward

 INTEGRATION WITH MICROSOFT OFFICE

• Document content is created with a familiar word processor
• Process flows created in Microsoft Visio

 INTEGRATION WITH TRAINING AND SKILLS

• Automated creation of training requirements when new revisions are published, ensure that policy and process changes will automatically initiate a notification of the need for training
• Identification of who has acknowledged that they have read and understood documentation and who needs training
• Association of compliance documentation with job descriptions ensures that relevant documents are identified for new employees automatically

 INTEGRATION WITH OTHER MODULES

Audit and Corrective Actions: Identifies internal audits that have been completed against compliance documentation, making the review process more straightforward

Incident Reporting: Associates issues or incidents that have occurred with compliance documentation and risk assessments, quickly identifying the more dangerous or most at risk business processes

Equipment Management: Link to assets records from compliance documents, ensuring control of validation and test records.

Customers Say:

Siemens
“Our biggest problem with the paper based system was distributing and controlling changes or new procedures and retrieving out of date versions. Now, only one copy of each needs to be maintained centrally, to provide technicians with immediate access to the very latest documentation, 24 hours a day” - Lex Smuts, QA Manager, Siemens.

Prudential PLC
“We had around 6000 working level procedures which were maintained and controlled manually and a project was set up to implement ISO 9000 across the business. Two products were assessed but Sword Achiever offered more in terms of functionality and support and at a lower cost. As a ready built solution Sword Achiever offered the advantage of support from a company that understands the product and is regularly upgrading and refining its product based on the experience of all its users. It also has the flexibility that a large, evolving business needs.” - Carol Pead, Business Improvement Consultant, Prudential plc.