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Thoughts and experiences on handling Obsolete Documents

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Hankesg

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Posted 21 February 2014 - 03:30 PM

I'm a fairly fresh technical writer/document control specialist at a pretty small tortilla chip company with aims to attain BRC certification within 8-10 months. To help accomplish this I'm working on building a documentation system. 

 

It's all falling together pretty nicely, but I have one big question at the moment: Do I need to archive obsolete documents after I confiscate and replace them with newer versions? I convinced myself at one point that having a change log on the document itself in tandem with a document register would eliminate the need for retaining obsolete documents. Destroying them would mean one less thing to track and we would have a recorded history of changes made to that document, fulfilling regulatory requirements.

 

Thoughts and experiences on this? 



KBMB

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Posted 21 February 2014 - 03:38 PM

Hello,

 

In my opinion, as long as you fulfill customer specifications and whatever your document control policy requires, you can destroy.

 

bkim



Charles.C

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Posted 21 February 2014 - 06:33 PM

Dear Hankesg,

 

What doe the BRC packaging standard say ?

 

For BRC food, from memory,  the choice is 100% yours.

 

I have always archived the original for 1yr in case of an internal challenge (never happened) but destroyed all the controlled copies (acquisition can be a bit like a dental tooth extraction).( Easier to pass the buck to the distribution group themself but this has definite auditorial risks). if the original is on a computer life is more simple.

 

I have never had an auditor express any interest in seeing evidence of the procedure although they always try and spot old looking documentation on the plant floor. Easy NC. :smile:

 

It is unfortunately only too easy to spend a disproportionate amount of  time to document control. It is certainly important but IMO small is beautiful unless you have an unlimited budget for workhorses, IT personnel, or nice software.

 

Rgds / Charles.C.


Kind Regards,

 

Charles.C


Claudia_QP

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Posted 21 February 2014 - 07:16 PM

We keep the original of the last obsolete version for a year and then destroy them. Also we destroy all the controlled copies.



Slab

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Posted 21 February 2014 - 09:21 PM

For my company we keep obsolete documents until record retention policy expires said used documents.  I simply keep a sub-folder by year that I dump unused forms into.  Currently the circulation is three years only because of MSC requirements.  I know, I know, I'm being overly paranoid cautious. 

As far as regulatory requirements I have no idea.


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Snookie

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Posted 22 February 2014 - 12:31 AM

For my company we keep obsolete documents until record retention policy expires said used documents.  I simply keep a sub-folder by year that I dump unused forms into.  Currently the circulation is three years only because of MSC requirements.  I know, I know, I'm being overly paranoid cautious. 

As far as regulatory requirements I have no idea.

 

 

I too, tend to be overly paranoid cautious.  :shutup:   Three years is usually what I keep as well. 


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