Document control

Document control is the practice of making sure that for every document your food safety system relies on, one version is in force, everyone can find it, and you can show which version was in force on any given date. The idea comes from quality management generally, and in a food plant it usually covers four things: internal procedures and work instructions, the HACCP or food safety plan and its supporting records, product and raw material specifications, and documents issued by someone else that you hold as evidence, such as supplier audit certificates, Certificates of Analysis and allergen declarations.

The word control is doing real work in the phrase. An uncontrolled document is one that exists somewhere, probably in more than one place, with nobody owning its version or its expiry. A controlled document has a known owner, a known location, a known current version and a known review or expiry date. The difference only becomes visible at two moments: when something goes wrong and you need to know what the line was told to do, and when an auditor asks for a document and you have to produce the right one in front of them.

A worked example

A spice supplier sends you an allergen declaration in January. In June they reformulate and send an updated one to the buyer, who forwards it to a colleague, who saves it to a shared drive. The quality file still holds the January version, and so does the printed pack in the technical office. Nothing has failed yet, but you now have three copies and no single answer to the question an auditor will ask: which declaration is current, and how do you know. That is a document control gap, not a supplier problem.

Control of third-party documents is harder than control of your own, because you are not the author. You cannot reissue a supplier's certificate. All you control is whether you know what you hold, whether you know when it lapses, and whether you asked for the replacement in time.

Internal procedures change when you decide they change. Supplier certificates change on someone else's schedule, and they expire whether or not you noticed. A mid-market plant with fifty to two hundred approved suppliers, each owing two or three documents, is tracking several hundred expiry dates that all belong to other companies.

The usual arrangement is a spreadsheet of suppliers and dates, maintained alongside a folder of PDFs, with reminders living in a calendar or a QA manager's head. It works until a date is typed wrong, a renewal is saved without updating the row, or the person who built the spreadsheet is on leave during an unannounced visit. Nothing about that is negligence. It is a document control model that depends on one person's attention, applied to a few hundred dates that move independently.

The decision in front of most QA managers is not whether to have document control. The schemes a plant is certified against expect documented, controlled records, and the scheme owner's own guidance is the place to read exactly what your standard asks for. The decision is where the expiry dates live, and whether the answer to the question of what is current today takes a minute or an afternoon.

Document control sits inside a cluster of phrases that get used loosely in conversation and precisely at audit.

• Document versus record. A document tells you what should happen, such as a procedure or a specification. A record shows what did happen, such as a signed check sheet or a chase email log. Both need control, but a record is not meant to be revised.
• Version control. The narrower question of which revision of a document is current, and how a reader can tell. Document control includes version control plus location, ownership and retention.
• Approved supplier list. The register of suppliers you have approved and the evidence behind each approval. Certificates are the documentary half of that evidence, which is why the two subjects are usually managed together.
• Certificate of Analysis, or CoA. A batch-level document from a supplier reporting test results. It is tied to a delivery rather than to a year, so it is controlled by lot rather than by expiry date.
• Allergen declaration. A supplier statement of the allergens present in or handled near a material. It is typically reissued on reformulation, which makes superseded versions worth keeping.
• Non-conformance. The finding an auditor raises when the system does not do what it says, including an out-of-date document held as current evidence. The sibling page on major and minor non-conformances goes into how those are graded.
• Unannounced audit. An audit with no notice, which removes the week of tidying that otherwise hides a document control gap. There is a separate page on what that means for a plant.

For what an auditor actually asks to see from your supplier file, and how to assemble it before recertification, the other pages in this pillar cover the BRCGS supplier approval evidence and the audit-ready status report in detail.