Document Management Tutorial#

Overview#

Controlled documentation is a requirement in regulated and high-technology manufacturing. Technical sheets, engineering drawings, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) or work instructions only help when the user works from the current version, at the moment the instruction applies. Documents kept in separate drives or folders make that difficult, because users can work from a stale local copy or have to search for the right file.

In Critical Manufacturing MES, Document Management stores documents, controls their versions, and makes them available to the users who need them. A Document consists of a file and its associated information, such as the author and creation date.

Document Management supports:

• Document storage: Depending on the Source configuration:
  • Internal: The file is stored on the MES server.
  • External: Only a link to the file is stored in the MES. The file remains in its original location, such as an intranet page.
• Version control: When a new document version becomes effective, all contexts referencing the Document automatically present the updated content, without requiring changes to their configuration.
• Read confirmation: When required for regulatory compliance, the MES can require users to confirm that they have read and understood the new version before continuing an operation. The system records who confirmed and when.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

• Create documents.
• Organize documents in folders.
• Present documents during a Material operation and a Resource state change.
• Enforce Read and Understand at Track-In.
• Check which employees acknowledged a document revision.

The scenarios target process engineers and administrators who configure documentation for the shop floor.

How Documents Are Delivered#

The Critical Manufacturing MES delivers a Document to a user in three stages:

1. Create the Document and make it effective through the applicable Change Set approval process.
2. Associate the Document with an operation or state transition using the Material Document Context and Resource Document Context smart tables. You can also associate a Document using one of the following:
   • Maintenance Activity through the Documents tab.
   • Checklist and Checklist Item using the Documentation URL.
   • Qualification and Certification using the Information URL.
3. Configure the Document presentation so that the user sees it during the operation. Optionally, require the user to read and understand it first.

Users can also reach a Document from outside the MES. Each version provides two URLs, described in the following table.

Table: URLs provided by each Document version

The supported content types are listed in Supported Document Types.

The Where Used view on the Document page lists only direct associations, such as a Maintenance Activity, and the context tables that present the Document. A reference entered as a URL does not appear there.

Learning Path#

Complete the scenarios in order. Documents and configuration created in the early scenarios are reused later.

Table: Document Management tutorial scenarios

Start with Prerequisites.