Within Engineering projects, safety and contractual obligations make it imperative to know by whom and at what stage information has been modified and reviewed. The transmittal is the instrument of document distribution. It follows a pre-planned distribution and provides an audit trail of when, where and by whom a document pack was received and whether it was returned with comment.
Aptus has created DocFlow to provide transmittals for document management applications in EMC2 Documentum and in Microsoft SharePoint.
DocFlow builds on each application to provide an electronic document control solution which tracks each copy of a document, managing distribution to internal recipients who need not be users of the document management application itself. External recipients can also be included and their contributions audited and monitored in the same way as internal users. DocFlow can transmit and track multiple documents using one transmittal. Addresses of external recipients can be pre-loaded and user-defined transmittal templates allow the choice of pre-defined transmittal types with pre-defined routing using e-mail, or paper copies.
Document issue can be planned and scheduled using customised calendars that are unique to the project, company and country.
The availability of a document through the review cycle or to third party suppliers can be measured against pre-defined time scales thus permitting control and review of the progression of documents within an organisation or work group. Dispatch and receipt dates of documents are accurate and available and documents can be expedited through the review cycles more quickly. Errors are reduced and the quality of information improved