I've recently joined a company that has had some bad luck with their last 3 practitioners. It's clear to me that these practitioners lacked the attention to detail to maintain a food safety management system properly. Many documents are completely missing, most documents don't match one another in terms of the numbering system, many include contradictions in procedure and policy, in-text citations of external documents are inconsistent, and revision dates and change logs are incomplete. Some SOPs/forms I have found several files for and it isn't clear to me what the most recent validated document was.
I've begun the process of basically rewriting their entire program from scratch for SQF modules 2&11, but the lack of continuity has me concerned about the best way to document the transition from the previous system (or lack thereof) and the one I'm designing.
For example - I found two files for a Corrective Action Register. It's not clear to me which one is the most current, and to be honest they both kind of suck. So I'm designing a new one. But neither of the old ones had a revision number or a creation date, and there isn't even a reference to this document on the Doc Revision Register, so I don't even have an amendment history on it to refer to. Almost every document has some sort of issue like this.
As long as I archive the old system, my question is can I treat my new SOPs, forms, WI's, etc. as "Revision A" and do a complete system reset? Or do I need to try to maintain a through-line from old, incomplete, or non-existent records?