Document Rev / IDs in Cetec ERP...

Expertise Quality
1

Hey Cetec ERP community!

I have a question to poll our user base on, on behalf of a new manufacturing company who is looking to use the Cetec ERP document management system to handle all of their controlled documents (as an ISO-proof solution!)

They are running into questions regarding how to manage document revision IDs in Cetec ERP. Currently, Cetec ERP auto-assigns a rev ID that is fixed and not able to be maintained, and this is done intentionally. However… the customer has a question, see below:

  • We would like to know how existing CETEC users are managing customer external, internal docs, ISO procedures and forms within CETEC.

  • Do CETEC users treat external customer, internal documents and ISO procedures and forms as part numbers to allow for the creation, change and revision control via the CETEC ECO process? How are the documents reflected in the system, are they in electronic form or PDFs, and how does one find the docs, are they hyperlinked to the part number callout on the screen? I know this method would allow some flexibility to reflect the current document revision level and capture the latest ECO change however it may defeat the point and purpose of the CETEC Document Module process.

  • If a customer does not associate external customer documents and ISO documents with a part number, again, we have to ensure the existing customer and ISO Document revisions are aligned within the CETEC “Documents” module “Rev” field. We were advised this can be accomplished by the initial download of documents with unique scripting by CETEC. The concern here is the CETEC ECO process is not linked to CETEC document control/change control process. The CETEC workflow/approval process can be user defined to allow for the review, approval and release of documents; however there is no associated ECO number assigned or dedicated fields to document the specific change/s and rationale for the planned change/s which the ECO process was originally designed and developed to accomplish.

  • Would it be possible to hide the Cetec “Rev Number” and add a user-defined field capture the actual revision number of the document within the document management system? We feel Cetec’s sequential “Rev Number” acts more like a document id number and not an actual revision number and would cause confusion. The user-defined field would need to be alpha numeric and at the document header level.

  • Regarding the user-defined field number… we thought about using the “tags” field for this purpose. However, still, the Cetec ERP system’s current “Rev Number” would need to be hidden to avoid confusion for users if tags were used for the actual document…

Appreciate any feedback the community has!

2

Hi,

We ran into a similar situation and so far we are not using Cetec document management system. We are using M-files Document management system.

  1. M-files helps us manage all ISO documents. In cetec, we just refer the document number without revision and ask user to look it up on M-files. In M-files, we maintain ECO and latest document revision.
  2. We tried making a part number for a document to maintain its revision, but it did not work for us.
  3. When we do an ISO document ECO that’s affects production, we do an ECO in cetec as well to record changes.
  4. Not sure.
  5. We have not used cetec DMS much. Please see below metadata for one of our document in m-files.
    image
    image943×605 43.1 KB

SAP, Oracle offer m-files integration for DMS. Maybe this is something, cetec can also consider.

Best Regards,
Asad

3

Quick update on this topic!

Some background… as a general rule, ISO auditors will look for paper. They will ask for paper, is the paper a controlled document, is there something stamped on the footer of the paper as to when it was printed, what “rev” it is, what was the effective date, etc.

i.e. something like this:

image.png

Thus, even if you were to manage the rev number in Cetec docs with “tags” or a bonus column field or something like that, if/when the rev changes, you would have to change the footer rev/effective-date/etc.anyways on the actual paper (or PDF, etc.)

Therefore, if you’re having to change it on paper, why not let that be authoritative (or so the reasoning goes).

All that said, one of the take-aways from this is that, if that is the reality of ISO and the reality of the way folks use our system, then it’s very confusing and misleading that our column name in Cetec for this right now (as of December 2021) is “revision”.

So, we have introduced a product change in which we are longer referring to these columns as “revisions” or “revs”, but rather “upload number”. See screenshot preview below, you’ll notice columns labeled “upload #” and “upload replacement”.

image.png

From here on out, if you wanted to leverage the “tag” field to indicate what controlled rev it is, that’s an option now! It’s just given with caution that, if a rev changes, it then would have to be changed in two places, both on the paper document footer itself and also on the tag in the doc control system.

Notably also the document control / workflow aspects of uploading a new document may still be helpful for document control!

Thanks @asad and anyone contributing to this conversation!