Document review and approval: 3 boards

Get 82% more approvals each month and accelerate your review workflows by up to 75%.

Proper document review and approval can make the difference between the success or failure of a project. Your company probably has to carry out this management regularly, manually and in different contexts: drafting of legal documents, creation of procedure manuals, elaboration of contracts and agreements, etc. All this, with deadlines and due dates.

Normally, and although it depends on its complexity, there are usually many people, both internal and external, involved in the process: the author of the document, the reviewers or the final approver, are some of them. They all have to be constantly informed of what is happening with the document, so that its review and approval is a success.

All this management is often done manually, with the help of Excel, Outlook and shared folders, which leads to numerous problems.

The lack of review criteria for each type of document makes the process complicated and leads to disagreements among the people involved, thus delaying or even preventing its approval. In addition, if there is no proper record of the whole process, it is practically impossible to keep track of it.

To continue, in this type of processes, communication is fundamental, and doing it through emails, causes from confusion and delays to loss of key information. This, together with the lack of control and security to see who has made each modification to the document, leads to serious organizational problems.

Finally, this type of process leads to the constant emergence of Non-Conformities, which, if not located and solved, can cause legal problems.

To avoid this situation, a document review and approval software like Docuo is the solution.

You will be able to create, based on each type of document that needs to be reviewed, an approval flow, with all the options and steps you want (for example, a specific one for contracts, another one for files, etc.). In addition, you will be able to associate documents to each of these flows with a single click, so that they start working automatically.

When it comes to communication, you don’t have to worry about notifying the reviewers when it’s their turn: they will automatically receive a link via email, SMS or Teams, from which they can approve, reject or even sign the document in a single click and from their cell phone.

You will have under control at all times what is happening with the documents during their review: who approves or rejects them, when and where the changes were made, etc. Thanks to this, you will be able to collect change requests in an organized way and send them to the reviewers for their consideration.

If something is not going as it should, it is not a problem, as you will be able to manage Non-Conformities effortlessly from their creation to the Corrective Actions that you will be able to implement in a simple way.

3 tips to speed up the document review and approval process

A document manager will make your work much easier, but to get the most out of it, you can follow these recommendations:

Create a technological ecosystem

Yes, a Document Manager alone works very well, but can you imagine what it can do when coupled with other tools? In the case of Docuo, it integrates with Microsoft 365 which will make your communications much more agile, you can create documents automatically and from smart templates in seconds.

Establish roles and responsibilities

Define who is in charge of reviewing and approving each document to avoid confusion and delays. With Docuo, you can set permissions so that each person has access only to the documents they have to approve or review.

The order of review matters

When you start the document review process, you should think about the order in which stakeholders will review the project documentation. This order, typically, tends to go from lowest to highest in terms of the company hierarchy but, the personal preferences of those involved should be taken into account. You also cannot overlook what makes sense to do for each project. Are there any stakeholders that, without their approval, you cannot move forward? Knowing all this, in Docuo you can set up automatic alerts so that each of the parties knows when it is their turn to review or approve the document, so they don’t need to be on the lookout all the time.

Final Conclusion

To avoid these problems and ensure an efficient review and approval process, it is important to establish good communication and coordination between all parties involved, to know clearly what criteria to follow, and to ensure that you have enough time to complete the process properly, three things that a Document Manager can help you achieve.

Do you dare to change, contact us!