File management

[sal.fresco]

Hi everybody,

I believe this is my first post here.


Anyway, my boss has decided to certify the company with ISO 9001:2001.
One of the requirements is that there must be some sort of file management in a way that anybody could understand and work imediately if needed.
For that he asked (told) me to come up with some possibilities to solve that.
One of the advisors that his helping with the process has come with this:

Main Folder (or server, or PC)
|
|On HOld
|
|In progress
|
|Customer Job
|
|Customer Files
|Pictures
|Development
|Final


The "On Hold" folder contains the same structure that the "In Progress" folder and it has the jobs that are waiting for approval.
The "Costumer Job", "Customer Files", "Pictures", "Development" and "Final" are child folders of "In Progress"

Do you think this works, or is it too "bureaucratic" (let's not forget that i'm in Portugal, a country well known for having a lot of Red Tape on any process)

Personally I think this may work to a certain point, but most of the time when you need to work twice as fast as you should, because the deadlines are very short and the boss is asking why things aren't done... you see the picture.

Also he (the advisor) says that we must keep track of all the versions of the jobs.
(I think he doesnt really know what is to work with dozens of files with 100's Mb's)

I hope anyone can shed some light and come with some ideas.


Thanks


Sal

 

[SlaveToTheMan]

We employ a similar structure here, which is important with several operators, potentially across different shifts. Any form of organization like this is only as good as the people using it, and willing to abide by the setup however.

Oh, and Welcome to the Forums!

 

[Bobmorli]

We are currently evaluating our file management system because in my opinion it isn't that great of a system. We have 3 main structures:
In Progress - Approved - Old
The files in progress contain all files that haven't yet been approved. the have a unique number (with version identifier) given by the ERP program.
Approved contains all approved files (with the same unique number and version) with subfolders for Customer Files.
In Old we have all old approved versions. Non approved versions get deleted once we have an approved version.

What I'm aiming to go to is a system were the operators just use one folder to process a job. All necessary files are copied/moved in to that folder wich has the production order number as name. We are almost through with drawing out our structure and what needs to be done by our ERP and workflow software.
We're also ISO9001:2001 and for the version tracking we keep a HiRes PDF of all approved versions for max of 5 years. All customer files and other files are also deleted after 5 years.