Thoughts and experiences on handling Obsolete Documents

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? 

Hello,

 

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

 

bkim

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.

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

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.

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.