USE CASE
Automating the review and approval process to manage the lifecycle of your policies and procedures can ensure that critical documents do not become stale and out-of-date. This helps reduce the chance of accidents, compliance violations, and other problems.
You can use a workflow to set expiration dates so that you’re notified when it is time to review and update your documents to ensure that your policies and procedures are up-to-date, consistent, and secure.
What are ways teams benefit?
Policies and procedures: align your Document Management system with company policies.
Consistency: Document management helps maintain consistency in policies and procedures across the organization. It ensures that all employees are working from the same, up-to-date versions of documents, reducing the risk of misunderstandings or outdated practices.
Security: Company policies and procedures often contain sensitive information. Document management allows for the implementation of security measures such as access controls and encryption to protect this information from unauthorized access or data breaches.
Continuous Improvement: Regularly reviewing and updating policies and procedures is essential for keeping them relevant and effective. Document management systems make it easier to track changes, gather feedback, and continuously improve company policies and procedures.
Document lifecycles
Document management is not just a matter of convenience; it's a critical element of effective governance, risk management, and compliance. It ensures that employees have access to the right information, at the right time, in a secure and organized manner, ultimately contributing to the success and longevity of a company.
With Comala Document Management, you can define document lifecycles that reflect the stages of your service and process designs.
You can define specific workflow milestone and permissions for each stage, ensuring that only authorized users can access and modify the documents.
For example, you might have a proposal stage, a project plan stage, a development stage, and a testing stage. If publishing a policy or practice guide, you can prevent these becoming stale by setting a time period for an “out-of-date” review.
Compliance: Many industries and organizations are subject to various regulations and compliance requirements. Document management helps companies track and adhere to these regulations, reducing non-compliance risk and associated penalties.
Version Control: Document management systems often provide version control features. This means that changes to policies and procedures can be tracked, and previous versions can be retrieved if needed. This is essential for auditing and ensuring that changes are properly documented.
Efficiency: Well-organized document management systems make it easier and quicker to find and distribute policies and procedures. This improves operational efficiency and reduces the time and effort required to locate and share critical information.
Audit Trails: Document management systems often maintain audit trails, which can be crucial during internal or external audits. These trails provide a record of who accessed, edited, or reviewed documents, helping to ensure accountability and transparency.
Risk Management: Effective document management can help mitigate risks associated with non-compliance, errors, or misinterpretations of policies and procedures. By maintaining accurate records and ensuring that employees follow established procedures, organizations reduce the likelihood of costly mistakes.
To get started
install Comala Document Management by getting started on the Atlassian Marketplace or through “find new apps” in your Confluence instance
apply a workflow at across all documents in a space or apply workflows on a page-by-page basis
configure your workflow in the space settings Comala Document Management dashboard
edit and customize your workflow using the workflow builder visual workflow editor for advanced authoring to create a more flexible and responsive workflow for your document process needs
Choose from the “out of the box” workflows or create your own!
Content expiry workflow
Content Expiry “Out of the box” workflow in the app!
The Content Expiry Workflow is designed to help keep your content fresh, the approved pages will expire after a set period of time, so that it can be reviewed again.
The workflow consists of four states
Review - while the page is awaiting review
Rejected - when the page is rejected
Approved - when the page has been approved, this state will automatically transition to Expired once the deadline is reached
Expired - when the page previously determined date is exceeded. You can always approve this version if the content is still valid
On the page, the workflow popup in the Approved state displays the expiry due date period lozenge.
The workflow popup displays a countdown of the current remaining time period. Each time the page transitions to the Approved state the expiration is reset to 5 months.
Once a page is expired, the Content Expiry Workflow will automatically send email notifications to page-watchers. This custom notification is created by a workflow trigger added to the workflow.
The trigger code can be viewed and edited in the workflow builder visual editor in the Edit Workflow panel.
Managing content expiration using workflow parameters
Expiration of content can be set for any workflow state not just for your published content. This can be used to generate custom emails and on-screen notifications to advise of log-jams in your documentation process.
One thing customers sometimes ask is “How can I warn my team in advance of page content that is nearing the end of it’s set time period before the “out-of-date” review?” Confluence does not provide a way to monitor this date but the following is a useful way of managing this and provide custom email notifications in advance of the set due date for expiry.
Customer case studies
We have a number of our customers who use Comala Document Management as part of their review and approval document management process. These include some customers who use our app together with Comala Publishing to help attain FDA Title 21 CFR Part 11 in the life sciences industry.
Disclaimer
Appfire does not claim compliance or certification of any of our tools. In addition to taking advantage of technical elements, compliant systems must also implement the necessary procedural and administrative controls.