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In the blog post about implementing ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems (QMS) in SharePoint, Valto emphasises how SharePoint can be a powerful tool for organisations aiming to enhance their quality management practices. The article explores the benefits of using SharePoint for document control, process management, and continuous improvement, aligning with ISO 9001 standards.
It will provide senior management with an efficient management process that is fully transparent at what stage each document is currently in. Along with who the system is currently waiting on to take action.
Documented evidence of key responsibility across the organisation. Filter by document reviewer, owner within the Controlled Documents or filter by who has not yet read key documents in the document tracker list.
Often a mandatory requirement if your business wants to tender for some public sector or enterprise work. This Controlled Documents system will make it so much easier to obtain and maintain your choice of ISO accreditation.
The QMS will identify then encourage efficient and time saving processes. Often by saving time from both employees and auditors finding documents that are stored in multiple locations with different versions causing confusion. Our Controlled Documents system simplifies this into a single source of truth.
Periodic review processes ensures your business processes are constantly improving. Our system will allow you to configure a review and approval frequency that fits your specific needs at a document level.
Our fixed-priced Controlled Documents solution is perfect for ISO 9001 QMS in SharePoint. A one off fee that includes deployment, config, live training and ongoing support.
Our Controlled Documents system is trusted by organisations across many sectors of different shapes and sizes from 10 to 100,000 employees.
A Quality Management System is often a crucial requirement for many businesses. Did you know that your business can benefit from the ISO 9001 standard Quality Management System in Microsoft SharePoint? In our blog, we’ll help explain all the requirements you need to hit for the ISO certification. and go through what you need to do to get started with SharePoint’s document management features and more.
Implementing the requirements of the ISO standard is not an easy task, it can be a long-winded process, but SharePoint can be used as a platform to build the quality management system quickly. SharePoint can be used to meet multiple requirements for the certification, specifically in satisfying the requirements for Control of Documentation. There are lots of out-of-the-box features of SharePoint that Microsoft has included specifically to help create a cohesive, intuitive and adaptable Quality Management System.
The stages of the ISO cycle requirements have been outlined below, along with the native SharePoint features that may be used to satisfy the requirements if you build your ISO 9001 QMS in SharePoint.
To comply with ISO 9001, you need to make sure that documents have an approval workflow before publishing. Out of the box, SharePoint offers functionality such as document libraries and workflows to meet the requirement of approving documents.
Within Microsoft 365 (formerly Office365) there are now additional products such as Power Automate (formerly Flow), available for automating the creation of approval tasks.
Valto’s pre-built system will send emails to the approvers of each document to ask them to review the document and either approve or reject. All of this is done within the email, as it provides a link to the relevant document and two buttons with an additional comments box as shown below:
Another crucial aspect of ISO 9001 compliance is making sure there’s a regular schedule for re-approving convent. The SharePoint QMS offers multiple ways to satisfy this requirement. For businesses with SharePoint Server, the best way would be to create an information management policy that can automatically initiate workflows after a specified amount of time after the previous approval. This can then start off the next review approval process.
We have built a function in Power Automate that uses a schedule timer to check the documents’ review date frequently. If the document has passed its review date it can initiate a review process.
ISO 9001 QMS in SharePoint functionality covers the requirement to keep up-to-date with versions in several ways.
Firstly, the platform allows you to enable draft working with check-in/out functions, and to only show Major versions to end users.
This allows document owners to work on documentation in a draft state without it appearing to all other users of the system or requiring approval. Once the document owner is ready to submit the document, they can publish a version that would trigger the approval workflow. When the document is approved, it becomes a Major version and appears to all users.
Secondly, users can enable document version history on the document library. This forces the library to maintain a specified number of major and minor versions. Certain users can be given access to review previous versions of the documents.
Enabling the document version history in SharePoint means you can easily meet this requirement for QMS document control. This will allow approvers to easily view what amendments have been made to each document.
With a correctly-configured ISO 9001 QMS in SharePoint you can even restore a document back to a previous version if a mistake has been made, and this will be tracked as part of the version history.
SharePoint version history can now even be surfaced directly inside a Microsoft Word document, as shown below.
Recently, the majority of SharePoint extranets are built in SharePoint Online. This allows you to take full advantage of free external users. This means you only need to pay for the licences your employees are using and not for external users such as contractors or suppliers.
This means you can give access to external users and they can upload documentation directly. This allows for a much safer and more compliant document management process; you won’t need to manually move email attachments or scan receipts from suppliers, since they can add them directly themselves.
In the example screenshot you can see how simple it is to share your ISO 9001 Controlled Documents systems to external parties such as contractors, suppliers or auditors to collaborate on documents.
Lots of the features we already mentioned would address this requirement, for example:
The documents in your system must be easy to access and understand. This is achieved by storing the documents within SharePoint in a logical way. The documents can then be tagged with keywords to make them even easier for end users to find via search.
The documents can be easily accessed through the web interface or even synced offline for users with intermittent internet connection. SharePoint can also be used as an Intranet Portal with web pages that make it simple to navigate to key policies as shown below:
Keep track of the date and time of when employees have read specific documents. This gives you two main benefits:
Our one off fixed-price ISO 9001 QMS Controlled Documents package for only £7,500 ensures auditable compliance:
In this video we highlight the top 5 reasons to use SharePoint as your quality management system. However, we have already covered off customised workflows and audit trails in the examples above. Instead I want to focus on the 3 more reasons why you should use SharePoint QMS. Integrated to Microsoft Office 365 - This is so underrated but is so valuable. This system is based on SharePoint Online, meaning it is built around using Microsoft Word, Excel and Power Point files. This makes it much easier for those already working with Office products. Simple Navigation - A lot of quality management system software are over complicated. Often containing a lot of features you will never use. Resulting in endless buttons and a confusing user interface. The benefit of using SharePoint to built your QMS is you have full control over the navigation bars throughout the interface. External Sharing - This is a feature that majority of QMS Software solutions do not contain. As this system is built with SharePoint Online, it means we can leverage the native external sharing features. This means you can share links to your documents to external parties such as customers, suppliers, or even auditors.Watch the video to get more information.
Speak to an ISO 9001 Document Management expert in our team today!
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