Have you got a document mountain?

Many businesses are very good at creating a mountain of documentation. We are great at creating new documents. We are not so good at getting rid of the old documents and so we build this ‘mountain’.

​Recently I was asked to provide advice to a business on the preparation of documentation that would meet the new Ministry of Primary Industries requirements under the Food Act 2015. The business had begun to prepare a new management system around the clauses of Regulation 110. ​

While this approach will meet the Ministry’s requirements, it creates a stand-alone system which is separate to the other management systems that the business already has. In many cases the requirements were already met in existing documentation. They only needed to add one new process and make minor alterations to their existing system documents to meet the Ministry’s requirements.

Having separate systems creates duplication of policies, processes, procedures and other documents. New requirements should be integrated with the existing management system instead of adding to the ‘document mountain’ and unnecessary cost to the operation.

The document mountain includes policies, objectives, processes and records. Each of these needs to be considered separately taking into account the risk that the document represents to the business. When considering documents you should ask, ‘What are the consequences of disposing of this document?’

​I will cover more about how you can deal with your document mountain during our webinar DEALING WITH THE DOCUMENT MOUNTAIN​