Document Control That Answers "Which Revision Applied Then?"
Current-revision control is easy and largely useless. The question an audit asks is which revision governed an inspection performed two years ago.
Every quality system controls documents. Very few can reconstruct, for a specific inspection performed on a specific date, which revision of the procedure was in force, which revision of the written practice governed the inspector's certification, and which technique sheet was applied. That reconstruction is what an ISO 9001, ISO 17020 or client audit actually tests, and it is a data-model property rather than a filing discipline.
What has to be under control
- The written practice governing personnel qualification and certification, with full revision history.
- NDT procedures per method, including the code and edition they were written against.
- Technique sheets and scan plans, which change more often than procedures and are frequently uncontrolled in practice.
- Acceptance criteria references, since code editions change and historical work must stay assessed under the edition then in force.
- Forms and report templates, because a changed template can silently change what data is captured.
- Client-specific procedure approvals, which have their own validity periods independent of your revision cycle.
Point-in-time recovery is the whole game
A document control system that stores the current revision and an archive folder of superseded ones technically complies and practically fails, because reconstructing which revision applied on a given date requires reading effective dates across a stack of PDFs. The property you want is that every inspection record references the specific document revisions in force when it was performed, captured automatically at the time.
Done that way, the audit question becomes a lookup rather than an investigation, and — more importantly — it stays answerable after the people who remember the revision history have left.
Technique sheets: the uncontrolled document nobody admits to
Procedures get controlled because auditors ask for them. Technique sheets frequently live in a shared folder, get copied and edited per job, and end up in circulation in several inconsistent versions. Since the technique sheet is what the technician actually follows at the CML face, an uncontrolled technique sheet undermines the controlled procedure above it. Bringing them under the same revision control as procedures is usually the single largest practical improvement available to a quality system that already looks compliant on paper.
Making control survive real operations
- Push the controlled revision to the field tool so technicians cannot work from a downloaded copy.
- Require the revision to be stamped onto the inspection record automatically, not selected from a dropdown.
- Handle code-edition changes explicitly: new work moves to the new edition, historical work stays assessed under the old one.
- Track client-specific approvals with their own expiry, separately from your internal revision cycle.
- Retain superseded revisions permanently. Storage is cheap; an unrecoverable revision is a finding.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do superseded procedure revisions need to be retained?
At minimum for as long as any inspection performed under them remains relevant, which for pressure equipment and tanks means decades rather than years. In practice the sensible policy is permanent retention of the document record — the storage cost is negligible and the alternative is an unanswerable audit question.
What happens when a code edition changes mid-programme?
New work adopts the new edition from an effective date you set and record; work already performed stays assessed under the edition in force at the time. The failure mode is retrospectively applying a new edition to historical assessments, which invalidates the original disposition and creates a much larger problem than the one being solved.
Do technique sheets really need formal revision control?
Yes, because they are what is actually followed at the point of inspection. A controlled procedure with uncontrolled technique sheets beneath it gives the appearance of control without the substance, and it is one of the more common findings once an auditor looks past the procedure index.
Can this live in SharePoint or a general document system?
The storage can. What general document systems do not provide is the automatic binding of a document revision to an inspection record at the moment of inspection, which is the property that makes point-in-time recovery a lookup. Without that binding you still have to reconstruct the mapping manually, which is the work you were trying to eliminate.
See it running on your own workflow
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Related: Document control module · ASNT Level III consulting · Inspection management software · Quality management module