Using Coda as Quality Management System

[Shaheed_Fazal]

Hi,

Hope you are all well.

I am considering using Coda as a Quality Management System to be able to comply with ISO type standards. I would really appreciate it if anyone has any suggestions on how to replicate the following elements that would normally be part of such a system:

1. Revision and Approval History of a document

I appreciate that Coda tracks every change but in a QMS, one has to adopt a more formal process. Google Docs allows naming a version but this is not the same as the above because the above type of process needs to record approval of documents as well.

2. Recording sign off status

We have to record whether our employees have read an SOP. This is usually done by having a table at the bottom of a word document:

Note that sign off needs to occur for every revision of a document.

EDIT: Also, not every user needs to read every document so we would need to have some sort of personalised path.

3. Tracking sign off status across multiple documents

It would be a bit unwieldy to monitor the sign off status of documents individually. Ideally we would need to track the sign off across the whole QMS depending on whether an individual has been assigned that procedure or not.

Thanks for your thoughts on this tricky problem.

Shaheed

[Jean_Pierre_Traets]

Dear @Shaheed_Fazal,

Depending if you want to start for scratch or have already an archive of docs that need to be managed this post from @Al_Chen_Coda, might be of your interest.

Extract data from tables in multiple Google Docs and combine into one Coda table

A Coda user needed a solution to aggregate the data stored in multiple Google Docs into one table in Coda for easy sorting and filtering, so I wrote a Google Apps Script that does the following: Checks a Google Drive folder for any new Google Docs that have been added to the folder Takes the first table in the Google Doc and extracts the info Sends the data to a row in a Coda table along with the Google Doc link Accounts for Google Docs that are shortcuts to a Google Doc owned by someone else …

As you already mentioned:

@Shaheed_Fazal

on this tricky problem.

It’s an interesting challenge, but to be able to start you will need to create “requirements doc” in the form of a mind map, to see all resources, procedures and relations that need to be followed (flow).

Then you could make an initial version and start to play/debug it

[quote=“Shaheed_Fazal, post:1, topic:17927”]
EDIT: Also, not every user needs to read every document so we would need to have some sort of personalised path.
[/quote]

With a button in Coda can be created a “read confirmation” log file

[Al_Chen_Coda]

Hi @Shaheed_Fazal, as @Jean_Pierre_Traets said, you could utilize a button that the employee could click to indicate if they have read a new version of the SOP. To automate this workflow, you could make the button activated (available for the employee to click) if the SOP has been edited recently (and the date of the most recent edit matches the date for some arbitrary version number). You could experiment with the Modified and ModifiedBy functions in a table to start tracking when employees have signed off on different versions of the SOP.

[BenLee]

Hi @Shaheed_Fazal,

Depending on how strict you need to be for this, you could go as far as embedding a PDF for each item they employee needs to read and with the button action that marks the employee as having read, also have it send an email to a company account and the employee that they have read that PDF and include a link to it in the Email. This would give you a second timestamped record that can’t be edited after the fact.